#17: The importance of wasting your time

Are you the sort of person who can only ever bring herself to take a rest by reassuring herself that resting now will make her more productive later? This episode is for you.

You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.

A while back, I watched a documentary about salmon. Bear with me on this. Salmon hatch in freshwater streams, often at high atitudes. Then they move downstream to the sea, where they spend their adulthood, which lasts for a few years. When it’s nearly time for them to spawn, they return to the freshwater streams where they were born. Getting there is hard work. They need to swim upstream, often for hundreds of miles, while climbing to higher altitudes. Being back in fresh water, after having adapted to salt water, makes them sick. Spawning also makes them sick - almost all of them die after spawning. So, as adults, they leave the relative comfort of the sea, undertake this hugely gruelling journey, getting sicker and sicker as they go, then they spawn and die.

I was kind of dumbfounded when I learnt about this. It reminded me of Sisyphus, the character from Greek mythology who was condemned by the Gods to push a boulder up a hill forever. I mean, why not just not do it? How about the salmon just choose instead to live out their lives peacefully in the ocean instead of taking that miserable trip upstream? They’d live longer, and they’d be healthier. Ok so they might not spawn, but … whatever. Isn’t that just obviously so much better? Aren’t salmon stupid! 

And then it hit me: I’m doing what the salmon do. So are you. We’re all swimming upstream as we grab for the next rung on the career ladder - that promotion, that grant, that secure job, that publication - and trying to make what we view as ‘progress’ (I hope you can hear the inverted commas around that word) - which might mean marriage, buying a house, buying a bigger and better house, having children, sending those children to college, whatever - and all the while we’re getting sicker and sicker - stressed, burnt out, exhausted, tortured by constant comparisons with other people who have done more than us, faster than us, and for more money than us - and then we die. At least the salmon find the energy to spawn after all that. 

Why don’t we just … not? Is that possible? What would it even look like to do nothing without, you know, starving and not being able to pay the bills? 

The thing is, wanting to eat and pay the bills isn’t the only reason we’re exhausting ourselves by working and generally striving, is it? It might be understandable if it were. I mean, of course it’s stressful not to have enough money, but at the same time, plenty of people get signed off work with things like stress, exhaustion, and burnout, despite having enough money to live on. In those cases, we work ourselves sick simply because … well, various reasons, none of them very good. 

In ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, the French philosopher Albert Camus compared the predicament of we humans to that of Sisyphus. Life, he thought, is meaningless - as meaningless as pushing a boulder up a hill forever - and yet we desperately want our lives to have meaning. To avoid facing the fact that life is meaningless, we do things like follow a religion, because the existence of a God and a life beyond our earthly one would give meaning to our lives now. 

Now, Camus published ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ in 1942 - and we have new gods now, other ways to give meaning to our lives. Quite boring other ways, actually - ones that don’t involve all-powerful beings and the promise of everlasting life. We celebrate being busy and productive, but without seriously questioning what we’re being busy and productive for. In 2020, Celeste Headlee published a book called Do Nothing, in which she shone a light on the compulsion that so many of us feel to work harder and harder, despite the fact that doing so makes us less happy, not more. The first paragraph of her book reads:

‘We answer work emails on Sunday night. We read endless articles about how to hack our brains and achieve more productivity […] We read only the first couple paragraphs of the articles we find interesting because we don’t have time to read them in their entirety. We are overworked and overstressed, constantly dissatisfied, and reaching for a bar that keeps rising higher and higher. We are members of the cult of efficiency, and we’re killing ourselves with productivity.’ 

Headlee is not alone in expressing this sort of concern, and neither is it a particularly new one - as she notes, the philosopher Bertrand Russell said much the same thing in his 1932 essay, ‘In Praise of Idleness’. ‘The modern man’, Russell wrote - and, of course, the modern woman, too - ’thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake’. 

Which brings me to the question I asked right at the start of this episode: ‘Are you the sort of person who can only ever bring herself to take a rest by reassuring herself that resting now will make her more productive later?’ Many of us - far too many - view rest as something we do for the sake of increased productivity. Even worse, many of us view rest as something that it’s inexcusable to do unless it’s for the sake of increased productivity, or increased something else. And what do we think our increased productivity is for the sake of? Well, nothing, it turns out. We treat productivity - efficiency, busyness, progress - as an end in itself, as the ultimate reward. I mean, sure, at any one time we’re telling ourselves that our productivity is in the service of some greater end - finishing a thesis, getting a job, getting a better job, getting promoted, getting a grant - but when we come close to hitting those goals, we find new ones. We move the goalposts, which I talked about in the previous episode. We’re salmon frantically swimming upstream, getting sicker and sicker. We’re Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill. 

So, what’s the alternative? For Camus, we just suck it up. We accept that what we’re doing is meaningless, embrace it, and keep going. His essay ends with the words: ‘The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ 

The thing is, though, Sisyphus - unlike you - doesn’t get any opportunity to rest and do nothing. The closest he comes to resting is walking back down the mountain after the rock has rolled down, on his way to start pushing the rock back up the hill yet again. Of this brief respite from rock-pushing, Camus writes, ‘I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end’. Sisyphus does not exactly chillax. 

But you can. Here’s a more uplifting view of your own respites from rock-pushing. It’s the story of the businessman and the fisherman - I didn’t invent it, and I don’t know who did. (You might have noticed that all these stories are wall-to-wall men. I’ll pause here for a moment to give you the opportunity to roll your eyes.) So, a businessman comes across a fisherman resting on a beach with a full catch of fish. The businessman compliments the fisherman on his catch. 

The fisherman replies, ‘Yeah, I’m the best at fishing round here. I go out and and fish for an hour every day, and this is what I catch.’ 

The businessman says, ‘Well, why don’t you stay out a bit longer? You’d catch even more fish! I mean, what are you even doing for the rest of the day?’ 

‘I hang out with my family and friends,’ says the fisherman. ‘I take naps. I read. I potter in the garden. I go on walks. I swim in the sea.’ 

‘Ugh,’ says the businessman. ‘What a waste of time. You should stay out longer and catch even more fish. You’d soon be able to afford a bigger boat. In time, you’d be able to employ people to work for you. Ten years from now, you could sell your company and make millions.’ 

‘And what then?’ asks the fisherman. 

‘Then,’ says the businessman, ‘you can retire. You can spend your days hanging out with your family and friends, taking naps, reading, pottering in the garden, going on walks, swimming in the sea …’ 

The moral of the story is, of course: whatever it is you’re ultimately working towards, you might already have, if you’d just reach out and take it.

Your problem, though, might be that you don’t really know what you’re ultimately working towards. It’s never what you think it is, because of that pesky goalpost-moving that you keep doing. Even your rest is for the sake of your productivity. But what if you switched that round? What if you made your productivity for the sake of your rest? What would that look like? 

Celeste Headlee has some ideas about this. She talks about working smarter, not harder - about working in short bursts while you’re alert and focused, and then stopping - like, forcing yourself to stop, difficult as that might be - when your focus begins to wane. Greg McKeown also has some thoughts. In his book, Essentialism, he talks about pruning down those goals towards which we’re working, so that we focus only on the really important ones (and by ‘the really important ones’ I mean the ones that are really important to you, not the ones that are important to other people, and which you end up get involved with because you’re bad at prioritising where you direct your efforts). McKeown has another book, Effortless, in which he argues that achieving what we want to achieve doesn’t have to be as hard as we make it. (I haven’t read that one, but it’s waiting on my bookshelf.) Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, too, talk about how best to focus our energies in The One Thing. In short, if you’re after a how-to guide for how to get more out of the time you spend working, there are plenty available. 

There’s a problem with this idea, though. For many of us, maximising our leisure time is scary. Our ideas about efficiency and productivity infiltrate even our downtime, and lead us to worry about whether we’re really getting value for money out of our free time - could we be doing something to relax even harder? Are we really drilling down and leveraging every last opportunity for enjoyment? Should we really be sitting in a coffee shop with a novel - might we better realise excellence in resting by meditating instead? I’ve felt this pressure myself, many times. On one of the rare occasions when both my children were having sleepovers with friends and I had a day to myself, I sat in a coffee shop texting a friend about how on-edge I was because what if I was wasting my me-time? I was worried because I didn’t feel that relaxed, so maybe I should rush off and find something more relaxing to do - but quick, because the clock’s ticking and the kids will be back soon. Perfectionism about relaxation was polluting my free time. 

So, yeah - maybe you can relate to the businessman in that story. Delaying your relaxation time until you’ve retired is, in a sense, much less scary than taking it now, because maybe you need to read a few more self-help books first, to make sure you don’t squander it. It’s important that we use our rest time responsibly. 

Except, this is a trap. Headlee describes in her book how the more successful we are, the less willing we are to take a break, because the more successful we are, the more valuable our time becomes, and the less willing we are to waste it by doing nothing. It’s a trap because ‘doing nothing’ is the ultimate goal, if anything is. If we don’t waste time by doing nothing, then we risk wasting our entire lives by being productive and efficient for no reason. And if you don’t view spending time doing nothing (or doing non-work things that you enjoy) as a priority, then there’s no urgency to free up time by spending less time working. You’re a salmon swimming upstream. You’re going to exhaust yourself and then die. Again: why don’t you just … not? 

If the idea of taking downtime for its own sake is scary for you, don’t hide from it. Stop and think. What sorts of things do you like doing when you’re not working? If you’ve lost touch with that - as many of us do - think about what things you liked to do when you were younger, before you joined what Headlee calls the ‘cult of efficiency’. Or think about what you plan to do when you retire, if you’ve ever thought about that. What are you working for? If thinking about these things makes you feel anxious to avoid wasting time, then stop: anxiety about wasting time is itself a symptom of your unease about relaxation. Take a day off - or longer - and waste it, whatever that means for you. Give yourself permission. While you’re doing it, pay attention to the parts that you liked, and do more of those next time. And if you don’t feel as relaxed as you hoped you would, that’s not because you’re doing anything wrong. It’s not because you’re an inefficient relaxer. It’s because you need to dust off your relaxation skills, which you’re only going to do if you take more time off - as much as you can get away with. This is what you’re working for. Happy time-wasting.    

I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use, and please consider <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-academic-imperfectionist/id1536191583">leaving a review on Apple Podcasts</a> and sharing the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful - you can take a screenshot on your phone and send it over to them. For more information and updates about me, the podcast, and my coaching, or just to get in touch and say hi, please visit the website - <a href="https://www.academicimperfectionist.com">academicimperfectionist.com</a> - or follow me on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/academicimp">@AcademicImp</a> or on Facebook <a href="https://www.facebook.com/AcademicImperfectionist">@AcademicImperfectionist</a>. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!