In "Four thousand weeks" by Oliver Burkeman, he breaks down that this obsession with action stems to the industrial revolution when it was decided that workers should sell their time for a living.
Before that we used to have task-oriented jobs, like milking the cows, which you cant do more than once in a while, or harvest the fields, which you can't do until it's ripe. In general humans are more evolved to this kind of work given our 200'000 years of task-based genetics versus 150 years of time controlling your action.
I’m not sure where this idea came from that farming was idle and only industry required constant work. Every hundred-year old book I’ve ever read that features farming includes themes of how the farmer’s work never ends and runs from dawn to dusk.
That is not the claim being made though. The difference is between work done (and payment due) being defined by time spent, vs work done being defined by tasks completed.
A hundred years is not a long time ago. its post industrial revolution, so after the cultural (and often legal) switch to work being measured by time spent. What about a thousand years ago? A lot of claims I have read for more leisured times in the past go back to hunter-gatherer cultures so much further back still.
Sticking to a thousand years ago, it would be task driven. They also had cultures, and usually religions that encouraged time off work, and with practices that encouraged not focusing on work. Religious holidays, sabbath day rules, payer, especially meditative prayer, but also formulaic prayer and pauses, periods of silence, hymns and so on. Even the meditation described in the article sounds like a secular version of religious meditation.
There's a lot to do on a farm, yet no farmer is expected to be working a full 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, at moderate intensity. No farmer has to do something within the next hour or their boss shouts at them. No farmer has to feel bad, or need to catch up, if they have to take a day off unless it's planting season. No farmer has any qualm about ending a day early because they've done all they planned to do. No farmer obsesses with stimulant medication or correct dosage of modafinil to get through their daily work.
And there's a huge difference between a subsistence farmer, which most of humanity has been for most of history, and intensive farming, which admittedly benefits from machines, but it's anyway a much more regimented industrial operation.
I recently read that serfs weren't expected to work more than a few hours a day until industrial automation really took hold. I wish I had the link, but it made sense - and then labor laws were a reaction to those expectations, not solving a long running problem.
> I mean, they would cut your balls off (castration) just to qualify you for unpaid labor in the old world.
And they would kill slaves right here in the new world. Neither of those things is representative of farming as labor — it represents specific moral bankruptcies in those societies. There are plenty of small to medium sized farms where I live, and neither of those principles has applied to them for nearly 400 years, at least.
Right, somewhere between the Crusades/Inquisitions (plural, cross-regional) and the Atlantic Slave Trade was the moral peak of humanity - is that the take?
Even on a quaint farm in the south of France the punishment for a servant disobeying their master was a lot worse than getting laid off with severance - one might say severance had a different meaning.
> Right, somewhere between the Crusades/Inquisitions (plural, cross-regional) and the Atlantic Slave Trade was the moral peak of humanity - is that the take?
… what?
No. I’m saying that none of these societal tyrannies has anything to do with being a self-operated farm owner now.
There are a few million people in jail and supervision in the USA, offloading the crudity and performing the work of incentivizing conformity, at slave wages as we speak.
I've worked on a traditional farm, and it's definitely hard work, and lots of it, but it is finite. Sure, there are some things you could always do, but usually there are a fixed number of tasks you plan for a day, and many of them have to be done at specific points in time. This naturally creates breaks between work.
I’m not sure where this idea came from that shit in old books is inherently rational or they would have any frame of reference to compare it to the modern world. Everybody’s conception of the worst is based on their own experience.
I currently work in a trade. My sixty-something boss constantly makes side comments about a life of backbreaking work, for more hours and in the midst of more hardship than any of the kids these days. But interrogate it lightly and you’ll hear about a guy that got a union apprenticeship right out of high school, was making a solid adult wage by 22, moving back and forth between another trade he had a house at 25, and was a classic truck collector and eventually fabricator in his 30s. Now that he’s in his sixties he’s going to retire with TWO pensions for life. If you talk to anyone in the industrial trades, they’ll know one or more of these ”I’m only bitter because I worked too damn hard for everything I ever had” guys that spent most of their lives under competent union representation, never had any serious threat to their lifestyle that wasn’t of their own doing, and owns a vacation home, a motorcycle, a boat, and multiple cars.
I’m sure they genuinely believe it. And I’m sure if they wrote a book about it, they would paint a picture of indentured servitude where the houses and cars and everything were sources of stress and financial burden. Then, they’d say, “hey, check out my cool cars and lake house,” and then talk about how living with your parents after age 18 is a moral failure.
We should all listen to guys like your boss. Circumstances have changed a bit but their beliefs are generally directionally correct and they have some great lessons to teach.
I’m directly between his age and the age of the people he criticizes. He has absolutely no understanding of what challenges young people face. His path to stability has vanished. There’s no apprenticeship program in that union anymore and in the ones that are, the percentage of your living expenses to your income is incomparably higher. The younger people work more hours than he did at their age and have a hell of a lot less to show for it because it buys a hell of a lot less. Since wealth compounds, this is not merely a temporary setback — it’s a completely different arc of progress. Many have replaced pensions with riskier and less stable 401ks. He has no idea what he’s talking about. His formula for success in life basically starts with “begin an industrial career just before the peak of the golden age of US manufacturing in a heavily industrialized area in the golden age of organized labor.”
The current pace of technological progress means that you cannot just sit and wait for the crops to grow. You need to constantly be learning a new skill on the side, diversifying your income streams, thinking and researching about how to optimize your costs and yields for the following year, etc.
This is because there is no guarantee that you can keep living the same routine till the day you die.
Also, humans are builders. Doing nothing and waiting for the seasons to change like cows in a field might not be in our DNA. Restlessness is our natural state, that's why we have all this stuff.
Interesting comment, but I'm thinking of the time scales involved. Farming 6 to 8 thousand years ago, simultaneous development in several areas. Before that millennia of hunter-gatherers (with technologies thrown in like stone shaping and metals?). Before that it is millions of years after chimps/bonobos/us diverged.
Something accelerated the restlessness, perhaps language?
> In "Four thousand weeks" by Oliver Burkeman, he breaks down that this obsession with action
Great book, but I have pinned down my obsession with action to my daily single cup of coffee habit. The idea of relaxation doesn't exist. When I sit down, it takes a minute before my brain desperately tries to find something to do. Guilt soon overcomes me. Even in the extreme anhedonia of the first days of caffeine withdrawal, I am able to glimpse a state of mind where idleness is both natural and restorative. I strongly feel that my creativity suffers because I am unable to allow my mind to drift, daydream, laze around on the couch without immediate goals other than the contemplation of life. Too bad I am too brain-washed (and lazy) to go through the unpleasant mental phase to drop the brew.
It is no wonder that our caffeine-addicted society is all about action, and we are unable to truly relax.
Necessary disclaimers given the topic and the constant disinformation: yes, I have ADHD. No, caffeine does not relax anyone's brain due to its mode of action, and any claim of doing so is misunderstanding the chemical pathways involved. The vast majority of us are too addicted and not self-aware enough to notice the effect coffee has on our lives, yet are ready to claim it's the miracle brew that only has positive side-effects
Yes, I know it's not that hard, but lately I've been going through a period of low mood, and I really cannot stomach the idea of diving deeper into the Abyss for a couple weeks while my receptors downregulate. It's hard enough already as it is.
You just explained your cycle though. At least you can see it, up to you on how to get out of it. It sounds cliche but it's entirely in your power to change it.
The reason you can't is because in this sentence, you are saying you can't (or won't).
I’ve been contemplating giving up coffee for two years, sometimes wanting to switch to green tea alone, for the reasons you articulated. Hasn’t happened except for brief stretches, and I’ll mark my coffee free era as one of sustainable effort.
I'm kinda doing a self-experiment right now with coffee dosages, using how scatter-brained I feel during meditation as indicator.
It's amazing how productive I believe I am when I drink coffee, yet my attention is all over the place and I think a lot of that feeling of productivity is placebo and/or chemically induced euphoria. Next I want to try tea to compare.
One thing's for sure: I used to meditate best, for longer and deeper, when I was taking dexamfetamine medication and was abstaining from coffee. Caffeine for ADHD is overrated and I will gladly die on this hill.
I think it’s way older than that. Evolution is all about adaptation and survival. When thick armour and large sharp teeth get replaced by soft skin and abstract thinking, anticipating danger and mitigating it and preparing for it becomes a full time job of every waking hour. Everything else is luxury and almost an act of mini-suicide
>anticipating danger and mitigating it and preparing for it becomes a full time job
For most of humanity's history, these tasks weren't so labor-intensive. So, evolutionarily, perception of these tasks evolved as a form of relaxation, not a job.
It is like you have a full time job of every waking hour, but that job on 80% consist of scrolling tik-tok, hanging out with friends and playing sports
It's interesting how this compulsion to work spread even to people that don't need to do it. Just look at how many modern-day billionaires are still flaunting how many hours they work each week. Up to the modern era, work was not seen as an inherent virtue, and even something to be avoided. Even well into the modern era, Teddy Roosevelt went on multi day camping trips completely unconnected from civilization. Just imagine a world leader wanting to do that now.
Roman emperors routinely issued statements about how they were working so hard on behalf of their subjects that they barely had time to sleep. Evaluating the veracity of those statements is left as an exercise to the reader.
Such great advice. I have been meditating for over 50 years, and while this meditation practice is key to my being happy and content in my personal life, hobbies, and work the techniques in this excellent article are something I have only taken up in the last few years. Sitting quietly just feeling grateful for quiet ‘do nothing’ time is wonderful, and just a few minutes at a time feels good.
One of the most concise and to-the-point explanations of meditation I've ever seen.
One thought I had while reading it: isn't trying to get more comfortable with doing nothing just another thing to do? isn't it another form of changing what already is?
EDIT: I'm advocating and practicing mindfulness but I always have this thought on the background and it's a real dilemma. Any thoughts?
Yes? Like trying hard to get into that state of meditation. Then you notice that you're getting tense and stressed about it not working, realize that this is not helpful, get angry at yourself for doing it wrong, try harder to do it right this time, etc.
It's my favourite puzzle about meditation. You have to approach it sideways, but if you really try that it won't work. So you try hard not to that instead, which won't work either. It's kind of funny how focusing on your breath tends to work, but... don't hold that thought.
It's a contradiction, and that's okay. Get comfortable with it ;-)
FWIW a good trick is to be aware of your thoughts, watch the tension/stress/realisation/anger/effort arising, the sort-of ignore them because they're thoughts and look for the way your mind tenses moving between them, then do the opposite of that tensing or let the tensing move you to a feeling of (say) extreme love or connection because if you're going to feel something that is more pleasant than stress. These things come and go, as you illustrate. Once you don't lean into them they tend to just go away.
None of those things are doing meditation wrong, they're just things minds do. The mistake is in focusing on them instead of focusing on the process generating the changes.
When I started meditating, I actively tried to ignore my thoughts, which was exhausting. So when I couldn't, I'd engage and ruminate instead, which was just as tiring.
The approach that finally worked for me (and one I still use today, years later) I learned from a book by Adrian Wells called Metacognitive Therapy. It's not self-help, actually; it's a clinical manual for therapists, but I read it anyway. The idea, in my own words, is not to engage with the thought but simply to recognize it, almost like greeting it and saying goodbye in the same breath. A thought comes, and you say, "Hmm, okay, I just thought that. That was a thought. That's fine." And you move on.
Of course, the book goes much deeper than that, but this simple approach helped me enormously with rumination and anxiety around intrusive thoughts.
If you take seriously the notion that enlightenment isn't some separate state or goal to be reached but simply the actualization of things as they are, I find the goal- and outcome-oriented drives tend to subside. Instead one is left with all the minutae of how things unfold, which seems inextricable from the goings-on of mind/perception/whatever. Paying close attention to those goings-on is pretty nice, IME.
Buddha addressed this idea directly. Your instinct that "getting comfortable with nothing" is still doing something turns out to be exactly right, and Buddhism doesn't deny it. Its answer is basically: yes, you use one kind of wanting (the motivation to practice) to loosen a deeper kind of wanting (craving a specific outcome), like using fire to burn down a house, then the fire has nothing left to burn.
Meditation, in the Therevada tradition at least, never claimed to be nothing, it uses doing to undermine it.
Your brain is a prediction machine. I am afraid doing nothing is inhibiting that function. I think it's perfectly healthy to not want to be a vegetable. Maybe using that life force to focus on the things you're avoiding by rumination and escapism is good enough, and we don't have to be cosplaying the dead to get there?
Sure - no real argument but it's maybe worth examining the assumptions underlying this which you know exist because you say 'maybe' and 'I am afraid ...'. Accounts abound as to why 'doing nothing' is not necessarily a negative activity. If you're in good health, sometimes absolutely passivity after having drunk in the fact that 'For a while I am alive and consciousness in this inexplicably incredible universe and it's a massive privilege' is extraordinarily beneficial for the times you are not predicting.
> I am afraid doing nothing is inhibiting that function
It isn't.
> I think it's perfectly healthy to not want to be a vegetable
Not having an opinion about everything for 3 minutes != vegetable.
The author of the post is selling what he himself doesn't understand. Paying attention to your inner chatter without judgement is part of a much broader tradition. Westerners stealing bits from cultures they don't understand is nothing new. Neither is the polarizing fascination/dismissal it entails.
> The author of the post is selling what he himself doesn't understand. Paying attention to your inner chatter without judgement is part of a much broader tradition. Westerners stealing bits from cultures they don't understand is nothing new.
Quite the elitist thing to say and a bit obsolete in the type of overly-connected world we live in today. Perhaps the author just shared personal experience; they did in fact write that the word „meditation“ was deliberately omitted.
Been doing this for 20 minutes in the morning for a few decades now. It has had an impact. I am a rather “high gain” person emotionally. I now tend to notice emotions and observe them, which helps when they threaten to suck me into a self-perpetuating ruminative vortex. Also, it has made me gentler, and an easier person to be around. I’m now well aware that whatever disturbances occur, there will be echoes and resonances tomorrow morning during my sit! Now for a moment of honesty: this is a religious practice for me. A prayer that “landed” for me: “Lord, I ask to be a conduit of grace.”
I used to sit alone for 30-40 minutes, 100's of meters below ground, in absolute darkness, absolute silence, no life around, no movement around, not even a breeze of air. Only mild thoughts to stop myself from falling asleep. Above ground, I slept under the stars and sky, in the wild, with no buildings around.
What I learnt is, recent generations have too much of self awareness, causing the communities and groups to become weaker, compared to the tribal settlements that helped humans to dominate other species.
I think this makes as dominate other species even more. Society, and especially market capitalism, is like a giant optimization function for productivity. If you step off the treadmill, you will get dominated by those who are on it and have the latest ICBMs, AI models, infrastructure out the wazoo, can produce 10,000 drones a week, etc.
Too much self awareness is still a problem. Even if you have ICBMs and drones, a society that puts less emphasis on individuals than the community, can survive through offsprings and community traditions and beliefs. As long as the community lives on through its children, it's fine.
For example, people in my community are mostly known by their family name, and not by individual's name. Family name alone is used as far as possible. My grandpa never liked to be called by his own name.
The idea is, as long as there is someone to carry the family name, individuals should not matter.
The individual vs community dichotomy is a can of worms. The proponents of these terms often misunderstand each other.
The "individual" is short-hand for negative freedoms, and from this you can derive many of the same values as the "community" types want.
For example, you can say that carbon pollution is an infringement of an individual's negative freedoms. You can also say that it's bad for society's functioning and public health. This is one example where the lens of the individual and community give the same result.
Typically these two words point to different resolutions of analysis, one concerned with a unit of analysis that can be more easily understood and more credibly ascribed rights (the single suffering human), the other concerned with the global system dynamics where the analysis is more difficult but can also reveal some emergent phenomena (sociology, economics).
Too much self-awareness can cause you to become blind to the experiential part of life.
Like, when you're at a party, not having fun, but instead thinking: "I am drinking alcohol to lower my social inhibitions at the cost of worse sleep and long-term health benefits, because I think in the long run the possible connections made here and the subsequent rise in social status will be worth it"
Resembled with above experience. Wanting to be self aware, I spent couple of years in confusion. Rather only thinking about what I am doing at any point of time, and trying to be aware, not being involved fully and not able to enjoy. spent few years like that, it is really difficult situation to be in. At some point, I realized, the self-awareness is towards emotions that are arising in myself, mainly, not on particular thoughts. means while speaking with others, if there is any strong emotion particular negative emotion raising in oneself. just being aware about that strong emotion actually cools down, and then it becomes a habit. and over a period of time along with emotion awareness also comes. and then we can still continue to enjoy the whole party.
Emil Cioran, in "A Short History of Decay", thinks that if humanity were deprived of work and sustained action for an indefinitely long "Sunday afternoon," boredom would become so unbearable that violence—crime in particular—would emerge as the principal means of escaping the oppressive emptiness of time.
"If Sunday afternoons were extended for months, where would humanity get to, liberated from sweat, from the weight of the first curse? The experiment would be worth the trouble. It is more than likely that crime would become the sole diversion, that debauchery would seem candor, shouting melody and jeers tenderness. The sensation of time's immensity would make each second into an intolerable torment, a sublime firing squad. In hearts imbued with poetry would appear a blasé cannibalism and a hyena's melancholy; butchers and executioners would die out—of lethargy; churches and brothels would split with sighs. The universe transformed into a Sunday afternoon... it is the very definition of ennui, and the end of the universe."
> It’s oddly difficult to do nothing, and while you’re doing nothing, it’s oddly difficult to feel at ease.
I don't have difficulty with this. Doing nothing, thinking about nothing, and simultaneously feeling perfectly at ease just comes naturally. I know that my experience is not universal and that many people do struggle with this. If you struggle with this and you were wondering, serenity really is very nice, and I wish I could share it, and I'm sorry that I can't.
I have this same cactus same thing, but later on I realized even when I do nothing, and even my tinnitus is there I realized it doesn’t bother me anyway. I miss that deep winter / snow silence now and then but kind of learned to live with it I think. I realize this is very different experience for everyone.
I noticed the more I do nothing (and think nothing) the more my tinnitus lessens. I think mine has something to do with permanent neck muscle tension, the result of everyday rush and stress.
My experience is that if you try to sit still for 5 minutes, the opposite happens. The thoughts and feelings that you weren't aware of start mobbing you, and you have to at least acknowledge them to get your peace. It's also one of the hardest ways to waste time, getting busy with any distraction is much easier.
The article allows for breathing and blinking, but has an odd constraint of “don’t move”, which AFAIK will make one fight their own neural system trying to autoregulate arousal. I’m not an expert but in my limited understanding, remaining completely still is not “not doing anything”, it’s very active inhibitory action.
As an experiment, just get in a nice running shower, so your sensory system will get external stimulation. YMMV, but for me three minutes pass quick. I just did that and when I decided to check the time it was almost 5 minutes already.
Real “doing nothing” is just leaving things be, just chilling out and observing whatever is happening without actively participating - and three minutes is a pretty low mark for that, unless we’re talking about fellas with ADHD.
Remaining completely still takes tremendous effort. Its harder than any dead lift or 100m sprint. You can do those at pace. But being still is binary act. It takes all the faculties and even then it's almost impossible without a very large amount of intense practice.
> Real “doing nothing” is just leaving things be
Yes that's it. That's what Zen, wu wei etc all point to.
I've looked at this a lot and my current view point is any actual concept of enlightenment was probably something invented by an 'influencer' in meditation circles thousands of years ago.
The irony of this is that trying to be miserable is more likely to circle the square and become funny removing the misery. As a Brit I'm culturally familiar with this.
> This is a crazy thing to notice after having been alive so many years — that your existence itself is so much to bear.
Alternative interpretation: my existence is not about sitting there, getting mouldy on the sofa. It never crosses my mind that I should feel unrest because I can't / don't want to just sit there and do nothing, nor does it feel like a revelation to think about it. Maybe it also says something about you if this is something you worry about on some deep level.
I recently found out that I'm the most miserable when I'm rushing.
If something happens, and I allow it to break the flow of things, I become stressed and worried and time flies. When I allowed myself to simply exist for a week, without a crazy planned-in-advance vacation, the week felt like a month. No joking.
Where this urge to always rush comes from is a good question. I imagine it's very much cultural, we're expected to rush and be busy.
I live in the hood and can’t believe how many people just “chill” all day.
Sun up to sun down just sitting or standing doing nothing. Occasionally yell at their dog which has never been to a beach or park, both of which are less than 1 mile away. Blaring loud music, the same rhythmic narcissism over and over, just sitting around without a single creative or productive thought “chillin”
Hey what are you doing?
“Chillin”
Why? Your life’s in shambles
“Huh? No I chillin”
That’s how most are already spending their ~80 years.
So, I kinda hate meditation. I like building things, playing in the ocean, creating, writing, traveling, eating ice cream with friends getting caught up on their lives.
I’m LIVIN! Not chillin or meditating.
I don’t want to be a human being, but a human doing!
Is the writer american, because it seems to me, a french man, a specially american take on life. Being contemplating and content seems a lot easier for us.
I might just be too autistic for this but I don't get why the article uses the word "existing" to refer to a conflation of contentedness/meditation/stasis/passivity/what have you.
Am I not existing when I'm worrying about finances or fidgeting with my hair?
I don't really see why "existing" should be conceived in such a subtractive fashion.
I'm not dismissing the value of contentedness/meditation/stasis/passivity when achievable (which, as the author acknowledges, these things sometimes aren't). But I am slightly miffed by the implication that any failure to reach such state is an inability to attain something as fundamental as "existence".
With all due respect, you might be overanalyzing it.
Obviously it is trivial to merely exist. All of us are doing it with (for the majority of us who are healthy) minimal effort.
The author is taking artistic license with the word as a shorthand for a specific form of existing well which is something that many people struggle with, and that many people would readily associate with this use of the term.
The Author did mention if something is happening that gives you a desire to move on to the next thing might be a state of not being present. I would characterize worry being in the future because something about the present moment is disrupting.
of course you exist regardless of what you are doing. I think the term is just used because it is the most "plain" form of existing? Just being around and doing nothing else at all. I'm not sure the term used carries much weight.
Because something titled "How to X" is usually supposed to teach you an optimal way to do X. Like, technically you can also get rid of centipedes by burning down your house, but an article titled "How to get rid of centipedes" is unlikely to tell you that.
I came here to read people's insights into the article, and it's pretty amusing (and a little bit disheartening) to find this complaint at the top of the thread.
It's pretty obvious from context that the author means "do nothing other than exist and experience that feeling" when he says "exist". Why does the author use that specific word? Because he liked it better than other words, and I do think it makes more sense and flows better in the context of the article than something line "stasis."
I don't know if you're actually autistic or using the word as a generic term to describe your personality, but if it's the former, my input is that it's generally beneficial to give people the benefit of the doubt, steelman their position, and just move on when you notice minor things you dislike. Filling the world with negative feedback for minor quibbles doesn't make anyone's life better.
It's a catchy but, yes, inaccurate term. Then again, this is an area which ultimately wants to escape terms (enter infuriatingly meaningless other terms like "ineffable"), so consider letting go of linguistic pedantry part of the exercise. Maybe a better framing for you is to think of your brain as a computer (which it is) and try and let it run the programs it's going to run when the "user" stops launching processes (or practically most of the time when meditating, runs a script which runs ps and then kills threads). The idea is that like clearing your desk or letting your system run some background tasks, you'll end up with a better system if you periodically practice making space in this way.
Well, let's give the author the benefit of the doubt and try not to regard his article or its ideas in a subtractive fashion either; there's more here than the headline.
There's a lot of woo around meditation and mindfulness, but I genuinely believe that one of the most valuable habits I've acquired is just sitting still for a few minutes in the morning with zero distractions and observing where my mind goes.
9 times out of 10 it tells me exactly what it wants/needs to deal with that day, and if I want to stay emotionally balanced and pursue my deepest callings, I need to follow its suggestion.
If I don't do this I become out of touch with my inner state, less focused, less intentional, and over time, emotionally erratic.
The article's caution about doing this exercise if you have a condition like PTSD is very good advice, because eventually, the real shit you need to deal with will rear its head.
Everything you need for self-understanding and balance is there in your mind, speaking to you, all the time. Most of the time instead of listening we pull out our phones and distract ourselves. Or maybe we do what other people have told us to or follow some other drive.
But if you can and do set all that aside and just listen to the mind from time to time, it's almost a superpower. I suspect that many of humanity's greatest works have come about this way. Someone listening to what their mind just wouldn't shut up about, creating the conditions for hundreds or thousands of hours of flow state, and then just following its lead.
We can all be pedantic, why do you have to be alive to exist?
Depends on the specific definition of the verb existing we are talking about, right?
90% of "I'm too autistic"-insecurities boil down to words being not clearly defined (or them being clearly defined, but either people using them without care or you not being aware of the definition they use). A word isn't magically stuck the the abstract concept it refers to, people can mean different things while using the same word. In philosophy for example it is very apparent that one author's definition of existence (or any other abstract concept, like freedom) may differ fundamentally from another author's.
We can all agree that sometimes the use of an word has unfortunate side effects, like turning something simple like existence into something you can suck at. This often boils down to (A) a use of the concept we are not aware of, e.g. if Paul Satré used the word existence, he has writen thousand page book on his specific meaning of the word and the author having read Satré unbeknownst to us refers to Satré's definition or (B) the author just chose a word that sounded cool and picked somewhat imprecisely.
I think here (as so often) it is the latter, but to cut them some slack: colloquially people will say things like "I feel like I am not even existing/alive". And what they often mean by that is that their life passes in full automation mode, with them barely having any present thought at any moment — wake up, commute, work, rinse, repeat. If that is your problem, doing something that gets you out of that automation state is good.
However I believe that many pasttimes can do that, e.g. playing music, climbing, a walk through an unknown landscape, etc. I am pretty certain there are indigenous people out there who probably don't even know of this problem to begin with, they simply just exist in their present moment. So this isn't generally hard for a human being. But it can be hard to some.
I mean it is hard to take such a blog seriouslt tbh with a title like "how to exist". I feel there is a lot of sprituality mumbo jumbo that gets lumped with meditation which is a fairly mechnical process that you can do to relax your body and mind, like a massage.
But people are not happy with it just being message, they want to espouse it as a religion or something that will fundamentally change your thinking etc. But imo an asshole will still remain as asshole even if they medidate everyday.
If you just look at the mechanics of breathing and thought control, they can be pretty useful to apply especially if you are prone to high anxiety. But there is nothing in it that will make you a better person or help you exists or whatever
This isn't always true. It's likely true only when there is no pressure. However, when there is pressure, one can "do nothing" for long periods. If you haven't experienced that, you've lived a blessed life, and you have more to learn.
I think you're equating doing nothing with doing nothing productive. You're usually still ruminating or trying to distract yourself from the source of the pressure.
I get where you’re coming from but they are listing these things out because those are some of the things you will likely automatically do to distract yourself from the present moment. I once tried to instruct someone on how to meditate and afterward they told me they spent the entire time working out solutions to problems in their head. I tried explaining that actively doing something, like solving problems in your head, means you are not meditating - you are thinking. They couldn’t bring themselves to sit there without getting their mind involved in something.
I think I might. In a past life I was a full time musician and had tons of time to kill. I was able to just go to places and simply exist. It wasn't to read or work or write or meet anyone (everyone was at work after all), it was simply "I want some coffee". I'd people watch and daydream for a bit and then I'd go do something else.
Whether or not that's what they had in mind idk, but it's what it immediately made me think of. I traded near absolute freedom for money, but that's just something you have to do as you get older I guess.
It’s rather “libertarians as cats”. The heroism of being content doing nothing but drink some coffee, stands upon the backs of hundreds of people seeking to better themselves who brought that coffee to your lips.
"Just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that statement! Many people struggle greatly with falling asleep. Personally, while I agree with you, if you are the type of person who struggles with clearing the mind, it's hardest to do when exhausted (hence common advice to practice mediation early in the day)
The more you require to do this - walk to the park, a lawn, no noise - the less you will do it. In reality you could be locked in a prison and still do it.
as the author points out, even thought in your own mind is a source of distraction and you can't run away from that.
Fundamentally you can be at ease with city noise just like you can be with mental distraction. One of the big misconceptions about meditation for example tends to be that it's about avoiding or actively quieting noise be that internal or external. It's not about changing the content of your conscious experience but your relationship to it.
“Even thinking is often a sneaky way of escaping the existence; rumination isn’t so much about trying to solve your problems, as it is about going elsewhere in your mind to escape anxiety and uncertainty.”
Profound insight that really gets to the root of rumination.
After having kids content like this is so unrelatable. When I finally have my own time, I'm going to do something fun, not worry about existential stuff lol.
Before kids I was on and off into meditation,my place in the world, being calm or w/e.
Same lmao. Similarly, I don't want to be rude or assume things but I'm really annoyed with 20-something-year-olds giving out life advice.
(I don't know if the author is in 20s)
I had a rather extreme form of this existence in my late-20’s, it was the first time I had ever really experienced such a thing (circa-2011). I’d never had any pathologies in the past, and this was shortly following an unexpected violent encounter. I spoke with a psychiatrist, and it was diagnosed at the time as post-traumatic stress disorder.
I wonder if maybe there’s something of a swelling ocean full of people suffering from low-level PTSD, even just from the trauma of staying alive and well in a society that you feel increasingly untethered from, as if stuck in place while the universe expands farther in every direction. The arriving tide of midlife crises for a generation of Palahniuk’s “middle-children of history”, those who had the wherewithal and luck to avoid serious addictions and hereditary alcoholism, but who still can’t really afford to be sufficiently medicated under a doctor’s supervision, either. So we resort to the permanent morphine drip of distraction, mainlining dopamine via headphone IVs.
The bottom half of a socioeconomic bell curve that’s being aggressively flattened, as if there were a pandemic of mediocrity and wasted potential. Stuck between a misspent youth, and an increasingly uncertain future.
TLDR; I think this is a very good first step for a lot of like-minded somewhat damaged folks. I ultimately took a similar approach—mindful meditation with breathing exercises—to treat my own PTSD, it worked better than Xanax to tamp down the anxiety attacks.
P.S. - Anyone who points out my em dashes can go sit on dem dashes. This comment was boutique, artisan, 100% organic bullshit. No memory prices were harmed in the making of this comment.
Honestly, when I check that article, for me, it's talking about existing with peace. Everyone of us exists. We are just passing the time. But the truth is to realizing that to realizing that the existence is not just let the time pass, go beyond that. Beyond the matrix.
This is a common form of buddhist meditation in Tibetan (Dzogchen / Mahamudra) and Japanese (Soto Zen shikantaza) styles. Instructions are nearly identical. Interestingly, it's considered one of the most advanced techniques in the Tibetan repertoire.
> This is the strange condition of the human being. It’s allergic to its natural habitat, which is the present moment. In order to cope with this allergy, it perpetually seeks things: feelings and experiences that are not yet present. It wants to always be getting the hell out of here.
I think this is way over-philosophizing and missing the basics of modern life.
Many people live in capitalist societies and are well-adapted to continuous 1) consumption and 2) production, both of which keep the economy spinning and neither of which involve doing nothing.
Whether that's good or bad is up for debate, but to attribute the difficulty of "doing nothing" to the fundamental human condition is a huge stretch.
As a long time meditator I know it's genuine from this:
> See how long it takes before you’re dying for it to be over.
This is actually true and it shows that they have properly done the exercise correctly. The reason is that daily living creates psychological sludge which somehow gets embedded on the level of feelings. Those stuck feelings are what give that sense.
Once the thought layer is peeled focus comes on feelings and then let's just say there's one more layer beneath into full blown Presence which is blissful. Why it's blissful to this day I still don't understand.
What's that paragraph about firefighter arson? Looks out of place, curious while there's another article on the subject on front page.
>Each year, roughly 100 firefighters are convicted of arson in North America, often on multiple counts. Most often they are young, new firefighters, frustrated by the lack of action.
Is someone tricking LLMs into writing articles about firefighter arson?
> This is a crazy thing to notice after having been alive so many years — that your existence itself is so much to bear. There’s always something wrong, even when everything’s fine. It’s as if you can only bear the present moment when you’re trying change it into something else.
I am not a professional and I'm not trying to be dismissive here, but I'm pretty sure you're just describing general anxiety.
Nobody truly has a hard time "doing nothing for 3 minutes" if they time it right. Morning and night tend to be when it's easiest for me, but others may differ. You should instead investigate what makes that time of day different from the rest of it. That's where the answers really are. You can and should adjust the flow of your day to make it happen naturally and unconsciously.
> This is a form of meditation, but I almost want to avoid that word because it makes people get nervous and overcomplicate it. Just think of this practice as existing without fear, for a few seconds at a time. Minimum effective dose is one half-breath.
This is already way too complicated. Nothing at this level of detail needs to be described. We already know what "nothing" is. Being too deliberate has a way of pushing the emotions elsewhere until they come back to bite you. The goal of trying to make this possible on-demand is unrealistic at best, or a self-help trap to keep people buying advice at worst.
I found myself "meditating" all the time on accident when I took on less and gave myself more time to do things. When you need a break, you need a break. The most important part for me was letting go of trying to impose control over this. I very strongly disagree with the notion of deliberate meditation. It's not a matter of "doing it right". It's just bullshit. The state of mind and results are identical when you stop listening to anyone's advice and just let it happen.
> I very strongly disagree with the notion of deliberate meditation. It's not a matter of "doing it right". It's just bullshit. The state of mind and results are identical when you stop listening to anyone's advice and just let it happen.
You assume others have had your experience and learnings from it. That’s clearly not possible so how else would you put it for them? Maybe you should contribute your own experience. But don’t expect everybody will allign to it 100%.
Today there is no guarantee that that sequence of characters, or the one it was produced in reply to, or, indeed, this very one you are reading right now did not come from a bot. There is a lot of "care" being performed and not much left to just exist.
> When you stop doing everything and just exist, you almost feel like you’re dying.
It sounds like the author drinks too much caffeine. This definitely isn't unusual in rat race culture, but it's also by no means the universal human experience.
I kept waiting for the punchline of the author turning out not to be a human after describing in detail what it thinks of the human experience. The text has all the hallmarks of AI writing at least
In "Four thousand weeks" by Oliver Burkeman, he breaks down that this obsession with action stems to the industrial revolution when it was decided that workers should sell their time for a living.
Before that we used to have task-oriented jobs, like milking the cows, which you cant do more than once in a while, or harvest the fields, which you can't do until it's ripe. In general humans are more evolved to this kind of work given our 200'000 years of task-based genetics versus 150 years of time controlling your action.
I’m not sure where this idea came from that farming was idle and only industry required constant work. Every hundred-year old book I’ve ever read that features farming includes themes of how the farmer’s work never ends and runs from dawn to dusk.
That is not the claim being made though. The difference is between work done (and payment due) being defined by time spent, vs work done being defined by tasks completed.
A hundred years is not a long time ago. its post industrial revolution, so after the cultural (and often legal) switch to work being measured by time spent. What about a thousand years ago? A lot of claims I have read for more leisured times in the past go back to hunter-gatherer cultures so much further back still.
Sticking to a thousand years ago, it would be task driven. They also had cultures, and usually religions that encouraged time off work, and with practices that encouraged not focusing on work. Religious holidays, sabbath day rules, payer, especially meditative prayer, but also formulaic prayer and pauses, periods of silence, hymns and so on. Even the meditation described in the article sounds like a secular version of religious meditation.
There's a lot to do on a farm, yet no farmer is expected to be working a full 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, at moderate intensity. No farmer has to do something within the next hour or their boss shouts at them. No farmer has to feel bad, or need to catch up, if they have to take a day off unless it's planting season. No farmer has any qualm about ending a day early because they've done all they planned to do. No farmer obsesses with stimulant medication or correct dosage of modafinil to get through their daily work.
And there's a huge difference between a subsistence farmer, which most of humanity has been for most of history, and intensive farming, which admittedly benefits from machines, but it's anyway a much more regimented industrial operation.
Hired hands, serfs, migrant workers had all of that and more for most of human history.
I recently read that serfs weren't expected to work more than a few hours a day until industrial automation really took hold. I wish I had the link, but it made sense - and then labor laws were a reaction to those expectations, not solving a long running problem.
I mean, they would cut your balls off (castration) just to qualify you for unpaid labor in the old world.
> modafinil
Militaries once issued coca, while opium was sold at markets as recently as the 1930s (over-the-counter).
Across the board it seems like things were rougher and cruder “back then” whenever ever back then was.
They had more freedom in other ways.
> I mean, they would cut your balls off (castration) just to qualify you for unpaid labor in the old world.
And they would kill slaves right here in the new world. Neither of those things is representative of farming as labor — it represents specific moral bankruptcies in those societies. There are plenty of small to medium sized farms where I live, and neither of those principles has applied to them for nearly 400 years, at least.
Right, somewhere between the Crusades/Inquisitions (plural, cross-regional) and the Atlantic Slave Trade was the moral peak of humanity - is that the take?
Even on a quaint farm in the south of France the punishment for a servant disobeying their master was a lot worse than getting laid off with severance - one might say severance had a different meaning.
> Right, somewhere between the Crusades/Inquisitions (plural, cross-regional) and the Atlantic Slave Trade was the moral peak of humanity - is that the take?
… what?
No. I’m saying that none of these societal tyrannies has anything to do with being a self-operated farm owner now.
There are a few million people in jail and supervision in the USA, offloading the crudity and performing the work of incentivizing conformity, at slave wages as we speak.
What was imprisonment like in 1920? 1320?
What year were the Mayans rolling heads down staircases?
I’ll take now
I've worked on a traditional farm, and it's definitely hard work, and lots of it, but it is finite. Sure, there are some things you could always do, but usually there are a fixed number of tasks you plan for a day, and many of them have to be done at specific points in time. This naturally creates breaks between work.
I’m not sure where this idea came from that shit in old books is inherently rational or they would have any frame of reference to compare it to the modern world. Everybody’s conception of the worst is based on their own experience.
I currently work in a trade. My sixty-something boss constantly makes side comments about a life of backbreaking work, for more hours and in the midst of more hardship than any of the kids these days. But interrogate it lightly and you’ll hear about a guy that got a union apprenticeship right out of high school, was making a solid adult wage by 22, moving back and forth between another trade he had a house at 25, and was a classic truck collector and eventually fabricator in his 30s. Now that he’s in his sixties he’s going to retire with TWO pensions for life. If you talk to anyone in the industrial trades, they’ll know one or more of these ”I’m only bitter because I worked too damn hard for everything I ever had” guys that spent most of their lives under competent union representation, never had any serious threat to their lifestyle that wasn’t of their own doing, and owns a vacation home, a motorcycle, a boat, and multiple cars.
I’m sure they genuinely believe it. And I’m sure if they wrote a book about it, they would paint a picture of indentured servitude where the houses and cars and everything were sources of stress and financial burden. Then, they’d say, “hey, check out my cool cars and lake house,” and then talk about how living with your parents after age 18 is a moral failure.
We should all listen to guys like your boss. Circumstances have changed a bit but their beliefs are generally directionally correct and they have some great lessons to teach.
I’m directly between his age and the age of the people he criticizes. He has absolutely no understanding of what challenges young people face. His path to stability has vanished. There’s no apprenticeship program in that union anymore and in the ones that are, the percentage of your living expenses to your income is incomparably higher. The younger people work more hours than he did at their age and have a hell of a lot less to show for it because it buys a hell of a lot less. Since wealth compounds, this is not merely a temporary setback — it’s a completely different arc of progress. Many have replaced pensions with riskier and less stable 401ks. He has no idea what he’s talking about. His formula for success in life basically starts with “begin an industrial career just before the peak of the golden age of US manufacturing in a heavily industrialized area in the golden age of organized labor.”
Not in winter, for geographies that have serious winters.
still need to feed the livestock multiple times a day, chop wood, fix stuff around the house
I think the difference is they're completable jobs. You work until it's done. At least for the day.
You aren't chopping wood everyday. Hopefully that's been prepared.
Feeding yes.
In summer it's non stop work, in winter you do fuck all.
The current pace of technological progress means that you cannot just sit and wait for the crops to grow. You need to constantly be learning a new skill on the side, diversifying your income streams, thinking and researching about how to optimize your costs and yields for the following year, etc.
This is because there is no guarantee that you can keep living the same routine till the day you die.
Also, humans are builders. Doing nothing and waiting for the seasons to change like cows in a field might not be in our DNA. Restlessness is our natural state, that's why we have all this stuff.
Interesting comment, but I'm thinking of the time scales involved. Farming 6 to 8 thousand years ago, simultaneous development in several areas. Before that millennia of hunter-gatherers (with technologies thrown in like stone shaping and metals?). Before that it is millions of years after chimps/bonobos/us diverged.
Something accelerated the restlessness, perhaps language?
> In "Four thousand weeks" by Oliver Burkeman, he breaks down that this obsession with action
Great book, but I have pinned down my obsession with action to my daily single cup of coffee habit. The idea of relaxation doesn't exist. When I sit down, it takes a minute before my brain desperately tries to find something to do. Guilt soon overcomes me. Even in the extreme anhedonia of the first days of caffeine withdrawal, I am able to glimpse a state of mind where idleness is both natural and restorative. I strongly feel that my creativity suffers because I am unable to allow my mind to drift, daydream, laze around on the couch without immediate goals other than the contemplation of life. Too bad I am too brain-washed (and lazy) to go through the unpleasant mental phase to drop the brew.
It is no wonder that our caffeine-addicted society is all about action, and we are unable to truly relax.
Necessary disclaimers given the topic and the constant disinformation: yes, I have ADHD. No, caffeine does not relax anyone's brain due to its mode of action, and any claim of doing so is misunderstanding the chemical pathways involved. The vast majority of us are too addicted and not self-aware enough to notice the effect coffee has on our lives, yet are ready to claim it's the miracle brew that only has positive side-effects
The trick is to wait until you get a terrible flu.
You won’t feel like coffee, because you feel terrible.
You won’t notice the withdrawal symptoms, because the flu symptoms are the same but much worse.
Caffeine withdrawal takes only a week or so, so by the time the flu is gone, the addiction is as well.
Just (“just”) remember to not get that habitual cup of morning coffee on the first day you feel kinda OK again, that’s the only hard bit really.
Yes, I know it's not that hard, but lately I've been going through a period of low mood, and I really cannot stomach the idea of diving deeper into the Abyss for a couple weeks while my receptors downregulate. It's hard enough already as it is.
You just explained your cycle though. At least you can see it, up to you on how to get out of it. It sounds cliche but it's entirely in your power to change it.
The reason you can't is because in this sentence, you are saying you can't (or won't).
I’ve been contemplating giving up coffee for two years, sometimes wanting to switch to green tea alone, for the reasons you articulated. Hasn’t happened except for brief stretches, and I’ll mark my coffee free era as one of sustainable effort.
I'm kinda doing a self-experiment right now with coffee dosages, using how scatter-brained I feel during meditation as indicator.
It's amazing how productive I believe I am when I drink coffee, yet my attention is all over the place and I think a lot of that feeling of productivity is placebo and/or chemically induced euphoria. Next I want to try tea to compare.
One thing's for sure: I used to meditate best, for longer and deeper, when I was taking dexamfetamine medication and was abstaining from coffee. Caffeine for ADHD is overrated and I will gladly die on this hill.
Have you tried yerba mate? That helped reduce the scatter-brained and anxious feelings received from similar doses of caffeine via coffee for me
> 150 years of time controlling your action
That, until the short moment where we all completely lose agency like in Pluribus
I think it’s way older than that. Evolution is all about adaptation and survival. When thick armour and large sharp teeth get replaced by soft skin and abstract thinking, anticipating danger and mitigating it and preparing for it becomes a full time job of every waking hour. Everything else is luxury and almost an act of mini-suicide
>anticipating danger and mitigating it and preparing for it becomes a full time job
For most of humanity's history, these tasks weren't so labor-intensive. So, evolutionarily, perception of these tasks evolved as a form of relaxation, not a job.
It is like you have a full time job of every waking hour, but that job on 80% consist of scrolling tik-tok, hanging out with friends and playing sports
It seems that at least for most women in those times every free minute was used to spin yarn, a job that was essentially never finished.
It's interesting how this compulsion to work spread even to people that don't need to do it. Just look at how many modern-day billionaires are still flaunting how many hours they work each week. Up to the modern era, work was not seen as an inherent virtue, and even something to be avoided. Even well into the modern era, Teddy Roosevelt went on multi day camping trips completely unconnected from civilization. Just imagine a world leader wanting to do that now.
Roman emperors routinely issued statements about how they were working so hard on behalf of their subjects that they barely had time to sleep. Evaluating the veracity of those statements is left as an exercise to the reader.
As the Buddhist joke goes 'don't just do something, stand there'.
Such great advice. I have been meditating for over 50 years, and while this meditation practice is key to my being happy and content in my personal life, hobbies, and work the techniques in this excellent article are something I have only taken up in the last few years. Sitting quietly just feeling grateful for quiet ‘do nothing’ time is wonderful, and just a few minutes at a time feels good.
One of the most concise and to-the-point explanations of meditation I've ever seen.
One thought I had while reading it: isn't trying to get more comfortable with doing nothing just another thing to do? isn't it another form of changing what already is?
EDIT: I'm advocating and practicing mindfulness but I always have this thought on the background and it's a real dilemma. Any thoughts?
Yes? Like trying hard to get into that state of meditation. Then you notice that you're getting tense and stressed about it not working, realize that this is not helpful, get angry at yourself for doing it wrong, try harder to do it right this time, etc.
It's my favourite puzzle about meditation. You have to approach it sideways, but if you really try that it won't work. So you try hard not to that instead, which won't work either. It's kind of funny how focusing on your breath tends to work, but... don't hold that thought.
It's a contradiction, and that's okay. Get comfortable with it ;-)
FWIW a good trick is to be aware of your thoughts, watch the tension/stress/realisation/anger/effort arising, the sort-of ignore them because they're thoughts and look for the way your mind tenses moving between them, then do the opposite of that tensing or let the tensing move you to a feeling of (say) extreme love or connection because if you're going to feel something that is more pleasant than stress. These things come and go, as you illustrate. Once you don't lean into them they tend to just go away.
None of those things are doing meditation wrong, they're just things minds do. The mistake is in focusing on them instead of focusing on the process generating the changes.
When I started meditating, I actively tried to ignore my thoughts, which was exhausting. So when I couldn't, I'd engage and ruminate instead, which was just as tiring.
The approach that finally worked for me (and one I still use today, years later) I learned from a book by Adrian Wells called Metacognitive Therapy. It's not self-help, actually; it's a clinical manual for therapists, but I read it anyway. The idea, in my own words, is not to engage with the thought but simply to recognize it, almost like greeting it and saying goodbye in the same breath. A thought comes, and you say, "Hmm, okay, I just thought that. That was a thought. That's fine." And you move on.
Of course, the book goes much deeper than that, but this simple approach helped me enormously with rumination and anxiety around intrusive thoughts.
If you take seriously the notion that enlightenment isn't some separate state or goal to be reached but simply the actualization of things as they are, I find the goal- and outcome-oriented drives tend to subside. Instead one is left with all the minutae of how things unfold, which seems inextricable from the goings-on of mind/perception/whatever. Paying close attention to those goings-on is pretty nice, IME.
Zen talks about this frequently. It's not a issue unless you make it one. Don't let it be an excuse not to be mindful.
Buddha addressed this idea directly. Your instinct that "getting comfortable with nothing" is still doing something turns out to be exactly right, and Buddhism doesn't deny it. Its answer is basically: yes, you use one kind of wanting (the motivation to practice) to loosen a deeper kind of wanting (craving a specific outcome), like using fire to burn down a house, then the fire has nothing left to burn.
Meditation, in the Therevada tradition at least, never claimed to be nothing, it uses doing to undermine it.
Your brain is a prediction machine. I am afraid doing nothing is inhibiting that function. I think it's perfectly healthy to not want to be a vegetable. Maybe using that life force to focus on the things you're avoiding by rumination and escapism is good enough, and we don't have to be cosplaying the dead to get there?
Sure - no real argument but it's maybe worth examining the assumptions underlying this which you know exist because you say 'maybe' and 'I am afraid ...'. Accounts abound as to why 'doing nothing' is not necessarily a negative activity. If you're in good health, sometimes absolutely passivity after having drunk in the fact that 'For a while I am alive and consciousness in this inexplicably incredible universe and it's a massive privilege' is extraordinarily beneficial for the times you are not predicting.
> Your brain is a prediction machine
It's not.
> I am afraid doing nothing is inhibiting that function
It isn't.
> I think it's perfectly healthy to not want to be a vegetable
Not having an opinion about everything for 3 minutes != vegetable.
The author of the post is selling what he himself doesn't understand. Paying attention to your inner chatter without judgement is part of a much broader tradition. Westerners stealing bits from cultures they don't understand is nothing new. Neither is the polarizing fascination/dismissal it entails.
> The author of the post is selling what he himself doesn't understand. Paying attention to your inner chatter without judgement is part of a much broader tradition. Westerners stealing bits from cultures they don't understand is nothing new.
Quite the elitist thing to say and a bit obsolete in the type of overly-connected world we live in today. Perhaps the author just shared personal experience; they did in fact write that the word „meditation“ was deliberately omitted.
Been doing this for 20 minutes in the morning for a few decades now. It has had an impact. I am a rather “high gain” person emotionally. I now tend to notice emotions and observe them, which helps when they threaten to suck me into a self-perpetuating ruminative vortex. Also, it has made me gentler, and an easier person to be around. I’m now well aware that whatever disturbances occur, there will be echoes and resonances tomorrow morning during my sit! Now for a moment of honesty: this is a religious practice for me. A prayer that “landed” for me: “Lord, I ask to be a conduit of grace.”
I used to sit alone for 30-40 minutes, 100's of meters below ground, in absolute darkness, absolute silence, no life around, no movement around, not even a breeze of air. Only mild thoughts to stop myself from falling asleep. Above ground, I slept under the stars and sky, in the wild, with no buildings around.
What I learnt is, recent generations have too much of self awareness, causing the communities and groups to become weaker, compared to the tribal settlements that helped humans to dominate other species.
I think this makes as dominate other species even more. Society, and especially market capitalism, is like a giant optimization function for productivity. If you step off the treadmill, you will get dominated by those who are on it and have the latest ICBMs, AI models, infrastructure out the wazoo, can produce 10,000 drones a week, etc.
Too much self awareness is still a problem. Even if you have ICBMs and drones, a society that puts less emphasis on individuals than the community, can survive through offsprings and community traditions and beliefs. As long as the community lives on through its children, it's fine.
For example, people in my community are mostly known by their family name, and not by individual's name. Family name alone is used as far as possible. My grandpa never liked to be called by his own name.
The idea is, as long as there is someone to carry the family name, individuals should not matter.
The individual vs community dichotomy is a can of worms. The proponents of these terms often misunderstand each other.
The "individual" is short-hand for negative freedoms, and from this you can derive many of the same values as the "community" types want.
For example, you can say that carbon pollution is an infringement of an individual's negative freedoms. You can also say that it's bad for society's functioning and public health. This is one example where the lens of the individual and community give the same result.
Typically these two words point to different resolutions of analysis, one concerned with a unit of analysis that can be more easily understood and more credibly ascribed rights (the single suffering human), the other concerned with the global system dynamics where the analysis is more difficult but can also reveal some emergent phenomena (sociology, economics).
> I used to sit alone for 30-40 minutes, 100's of meters below ground, in absolute darkness, absolute silence, no life around
do you happen to be the narrator of notes from the underground?
How can one possibly have ‘too much self-awareness?’
under what circumstances is it beneficial to have less awareness of oneself?
Too much self-awareness can cause you to become blind to the experiential part of life.
Like, when you're at a party, not having fun, but instead thinking: "I am drinking alcohol to lower my social inhibitions at the cost of worse sleep and long-term health benefits, because I think in the long run the possible connections made here and the subsequent rise in social status will be worth it"
Resembled with above experience. Wanting to be self aware, I spent couple of years in confusion. Rather only thinking about what I am doing at any point of time, and trying to be aware, not being involved fully and not able to enjoy. spent few years like that, it is really difficult situation to be in. At some point, I realized, the self-awareness is towards emotions that are arising in myself, mainly, not on particular thoughts. means while speaking with others, if there is any strong emotion particular negative emotion raising in oneself. just being aware about that strong emotion actually cools down, and then it becomes a habit. and over a period of time along with emotion awareness also comes. and then we can still continue to enjoy the whole party.
Emil Cioran, in "A Short History of Decay", thinks that if humanity were deprived of work and sustained action for an indefinitely long "Sunday afternoon," boredom would become so unbearable that violence—crime in particular—would emerge as the principal means of escaping the oppressive emptiness of time.
"If Sunday afternoons were extended for months, where would humanity get to, liberated from sweat, from the weight of the first curse? The experiment would be worth the trouble. It is more than likely that crime would become the sole diversion, that debauchery would seem candor, shouting melody and jeers tenderness. The sensation of time's immensity would make each second into an intolerable torment, a sublime firing squad. In hearts imbued with poetry would appear a blasé cannibalism and a hyena's melancholy; butchers and executioners would die out—of lethargy; churches and brothels would split with sighs. The universe transformed into a Sunday afternoon... it is the very definition of ennui, and the end of the universe."
> It’s oddly difficult to do nothing, and while you’re doing nothing, it’s oddly difficult to feel at ease.
I don't have difficulty with this. Doing nothing, thinking about nothing, and simultaneously feeling perfectly at ease just comes naturally. I know that my experience is not universal and that many people do struggle with this. If you struggle with this and you were wondering, serenity really is very nice, and I wish I could share it, and I'm sorry that I can't.
I'm lucky enough to not notice my tinnitus except when I try to do nothing.
I have this same cactus same thing, but later on I realized even when I do nothing, and even my tinnitus is there I realized it doesn’t bother me anyway. I miss that deep winter / snow silence now and then but kind of learned to live with it I think. I realize this is very different experience for everyone.
I noticed the more I do nothing (and think nothing) the more my tinnitus lessens. I think mine has something to do with permanent neck muscle tension, the result of everyday rush and stress.
I feel like people are already pretty great at dissociating and ignoring their own thoughts and feelings just to exist today.
My experience is that if you try to sit still for 5 minutes, the opposite happens. The thoughts and feelings that you weren't aware of start mobbing you, and you have to at least acknowledge them to get your peace. It's also one of the hardest ways to waste time, getting busy with any distraction is much easier.
1. Don't do anything 2. Be content
The second rule conflicts with the first making this impossible.
Any experienced meditator knows that to 'be content' isn't a passive action. You have to think to do it.
If you truly practice no thought, there is no 'content' to be.
The article allows for breathing and blinking, but has an odd constraint of “don’t move”, which AFAIK will make one fight their own neural system trying to autoregulate arousal. I’m not an expert but in my limited understanding, remaining completely still is not “not doing anything”, it’s very active inhibitory action.
As an experiment, just get in a nice running shower, so your sensory system will get external stimulation. YMMV, but for me three minutes pass quick. I just did that and when I decided to check the time it was almost 5 minutes already.
Real “doing nothing” is just leaving things be, just chilling out and observing whatever is happening without actively participating - and three minutes is a pretty low mark for that, unless we’re talking about fellas with ADHD.
Remaining completely still takes tremendous effort. Its harder than any dead lift or 100m sprint. You can do those at pace. But being still is binary act. It takes all the faculties and even then it's almost impossible without a very large amount of intense practice.
> Real “doing nothing” is just leaving things be
Yes that's it. That's what Zen, wu wei etc all point to.
I've looked at this a lot and my current view point is any actual concept of enlightenment was probably something invented by an 'influencer' in meditation circles thousands of years ago.
Maybe they mean something closer to “do nothing and try not to be miserable”
The irony of this is that trying to be miserable is more likely to circle the square and become funny removing the misery. As a Brit I'm culturally familiar with this.
> This is a crazy thing to notice after having been alive so many years — that your existence itself is so much to bear.
Alternative interpretation: my existence is not about sitting there, getting mouldy on the sofa. It never crosses my mind that I should feel unrest because I can't / don't want to just sit there and do nothing, nor does it feel like a revelation to think about it. Maybe it also says something about you if this is something you worry about on some deep level.
I recently found out that I'm the most miserable when I'm rushing.
If something happens, and I allow it to break the flow of things, I become stressed and worried and time flies. When I allowed myself to simply exist for a week, without a crazy planned-in-advance vacation, the week felt like a month. No joking.
Where this urge to always rush comes from is a good question. I imagine it's very much cultural, we're expected to rush and be busy.
I live in the hood and can’t believe how many people just “chill” all day.
Sun up to sun down just sitting or standing doing nothing. Occasionally yell at their dog which has never been to a beach or park, both of which are less than 1 mile away. Blaring loud music, the same rhythmic narcissism over and over, just sitting around without a single creative or productive thought “chillin”
Hey what are you doing?
“Chillin”
Why? Your life’s in shambles
“Huh? No I chillin”
That’s how most are already spending their ~80 years.
So, I kinda hate meditation. I like building things, playing in the ocean, creating, writing, traveling, eating ice cream with friends getting caught up on their lives.
I’m LIVIN! Not chillin or meditating.
I don’t want to be a human being, but a human doing!
Is the writer american, because it seems to me, a french man, a specially american take on life. Being contemplating and content seems a lot easier for us.
Americans do seem to be a rather compulsive and anxious sort.
I might just be too autistic for this but I don't get why the article uses the word "existing" to refer to a conflation of contentedness/meditation/stasis/passivity/what have you.
Am I not existing when I'm worrying about finances or fidgeting with my hair?
I don't really see why "existing" should be conceived in such a subtractive fashion.
I'm not dismissing the value of contentedness/meditation/stasis/passivity when achievable (which, as the author acknowledges, these things sometimes aren't). But I am slightly miffed by the implication that any failure to reach such state is an inability to attain something as fundamental as "existence".
(end rant)
With all due respect, you might be overanalyzing it.
Obviously it is trivial to merely exist. All of us are doing it with (for the majority of us who are healthy) minimal effort.
The author is taking artistic license with the word as a shorthand for a specific form of existing well which is something that many people struggle with, and that many people would readily associate with this use of the term.
The Author did mention if something is happening that gives you a desire to move on to the next thing might be a state of not being present. I would characterize worry being in the future because something about the present moment is disrupting.
It’s a result of people being less literate. “Existing” is used to describe passing time without meaning. What author should have used is “being”.
That word isn't any better. I am regardless of what I'm doing or how I'm feeling.
of course you exist regardless of what you are doing. I think the term is just used because it is the most "plain" form of existing? Just being around and doing nothing else at all. I'm not sure the term used carries much weight.
Because something titled "How to X" is usually supposed to teach you an optimal way to do X. Like, technically you can also get rid of centipedes by burning down your house, but an article titled "How to get rid of centipedes" is unlikely to tell you that.
I came here to read people's insights into the article, and it's pretty amusing (and a little bit disheartening) to find this complaint at the top of the thread.
It's pretty obvious from context that the author means "do nothing other than exist and experience that feeling" when he says "exist". Why does the author use that specific word? Because he liked it better than other words, and I do think it makes more sense and flows better in the context of the article than something line "stasis."
I don't know if you're actually autistic or using the word as a generic term to describe your personality, but if it's the former, my input is that it's generally beneficial to give people the benefit of the doubt, steelman their position, and just move on when you notice minor things you dislike. Filling the world with negative feedback for minor quibbles doesn't make anyone's life better.
It's a catchy but, yes, inaccurate term. Then again, this is an area which ultimately wants to escape terms (enter infuriatingly meaningless other terms like "ineffable"), so consider letting go of linguistic pedantry part of the exercise. Maybe a better framing for you is to think of your brain as a computer (which it is) and try and let it run the programs it's going to run when the "user" stops launching processes (or practically most of the time when meditating, runs a script which runs ps and then kills threads). The idea is that like clearing your desk or letting your system run some background tasks, you'll end up with a better system if you periodically practice making space in this way.
Well, let's give the author the benefit of the doubt and try not to regard his article or its ideas in a subtractive fashion either; there's more here than the headline.
There's a lot of woo around meditation and mindfulness, but I genuinely believe that one of the most valuable habits I've acquired is just sitting still for a few minutes in the morning with zero distractions and observing where my mind goes.
9 times out of 10 it tells me exactly what it wants/needs to deal with that day, and if I want to stay emotionally balanced and pursue my deepest callings, I need to follow its suggestion.
If I don't do this I become out of touch with my inner state, less focused, less intentional, and over time, emotionally erratic.
The article's caution about doing this exercise if you have a condition like PTSD is very good advice, because eventually, the real shit you need to deal with will rear its head.
Everything you need for self-understanding and balance is there in your mind, speaking to you, all the time. Most of the time instead of listening we pull out our phones and distract ourselves. Or maybe we do what other people have told us to or follow some other drive.
But if you can and do set all that aside and just listen to the mind from time to time, it's almost a superpower. I suspect that many of humanity's greatest works have come about this way. Someone listening to what their mind just wouldn't shut up about, creating the conditions for hundreds or thousands of hours of flow state, and then just following its lead.
To me the title just read like: how to exist skillfully.
You are onto something, brother. Nirvana is samsara, samsara is nirvana. Buddha mind is every day mind.
We can all be pedantic, why do you have to be alive to exist?
Depends on the specific definition of the verb existing we are talking about, right?
90% of "I'm too autistic"-insecurities boil down to words being not clearly defined (or them being clearly defined, but either people using them without care or you not being aware of the definition they use). A word isn't magically stuck the the abstract concept it refers to, people can mean different things while using the same word. In philosophy for example it is very apparent that one author's definition of existence (or any other abstract concept, like freedom) may differ fundamentally from another author's.
We can all agree that sometimes the use of an word has unfortunate side effects, like turning something simple like existence into something you can suck at. This often boils down to (A) a use of the concept we are not aware of, e.g. if Paul Satré used the word existence, he has writen thousand page book on his specific meaning of the word and the author having read Satré unbeknownst to us refers to Satré's definition or (B) the author just chose a word that sounded cool and picked somewhat imprecisely.
I think here (as so often) it is the latter, but to cut them some slack: colloquially people will say things like "I feel like I am not even existing/alive". And what they often mean by that is that their life passes in full automation mode, with them barely having any present thought at any moment — wake up, commute, work, rinse, repeat. If that is your problem, doing something that gets you out of that automation state is good.
However I believe that many pasttimes can do that, e.g. playing music, climbing, a walk through an unknown landscape, etc. I am pretty certain there are indigenous people out there who probably don't even know of this problem to begin with, they simply just exist in their present moment. So this isn't generally hard for a human being. But it can be hard to some.
I mean it is hard to take such a blog seriouslt tbh with a title like "how to exist". I feel there is a lot of sprituality mumbo jumbo that gets lumped with meditation which is a fairly mechnical process that you can do to relax your body and mind, like a massage.
But people are not happy with it just being message, they want to espouse it as a religion or something that will fundamentally change your thinking etc. But imo an asshole will still remain as asshole even if they medidate everyday.
If you just look at the mechanics of breathing and thought control, they can be pretty useful to apply especially if you are prone to high anxiety. But there is nothing in it that will make you a better person or help you exists or whatever
"It’s oddly difficult to do nothing"
This isn't always true. It's likely true only when there is no pressure. However, when there is pressure, one can "do nothing" for long periods. If you haven't experienced that, you've lived a blessed life, and you have more to learn.
I think you're equating doing nothing with doing nothing productive. You're usually still ruminating or trying to distract yourself from the source of the pressure.
What is an example? I can only think of a root canal procedure.
I get where you’re coming from but they are listing these things out because those are some of the things you will likely automatically do to distract yourself from the present moment. I once tried to instruct someone on how to meditate and afterward they told me they spent the entire time working out solutions to problems in their head. I tried explaining that actively doing something, like solving problems in your head, means you are not meditating - you are thinking. They couldn’t bring themselves to sit there without getting their mind involved in something.
So, instead of solving problems, you want them to solve the problem of not thinking about solving problems?
I sense the snark but no. Just fully experience your current moment as it changes without inserting yourself.
I don't understand the hero image of hipsters sipping espresso in a cafe.
Is that an example of how to exist? How not to exist? I can see an argument for either one lol.
I think I might. In a past life I was a full time musician and had tons of time to kill. I was able to just go to places and simply exist. It wasn't to read or work or write or meet anyone (everyone was at work after all), it was simply "I want some coffee". I'd people watch and daydream for a bit and then I'd go do something else.
Whether or not that's what they had in mind idk, but it's what it immediately made me think of. I traded near absolute freedom for money, but that's just something you have to do as you get older I guess.
It’s rather “libertarians as cats”. The heroism of being content doing nothing but drink some coffee, stands upon the backs of hundreds of people seeking to better themselves who brought that coffee to your lips.
Isn't that just how one falls asleep? I've been doing this every evening for decades.
"Just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that statement! Many people struggle greatly with falling asleep. Personally, while I agree with you, if you are the type of person who struggles with clearing the mind, it's hardest to do when exhausted (hence common advice to practice mediation early in the day)
I guess I could imagine this being tricky if you're stuck in a city apartment with no yard and no park nearby ...
The more you require to do this - walk to the park, a lawn, no noise - the less you will do it. In reality you could be locked in a prison and still do it.
You can close your eyes. Tricky if it's noisy - but then that's an issue in itself.
The foundation of this practice is just sitting still and observing in acceptance, which also works when it is noisy.
Oxygenated air is all you need
as the author points out, even thought in your own mind is a source of distraction and you can't run away from that.
Fundamentally you can be at ease with city noise just like you can be with mental distraction. One of the big misconceptions about meditation for example tends to be that it's about avoiding or actively quieting noise be that internal or external. It's not about changing the content of your conscious experience but your relationship to it.
“Even thinking is often a sneaky way of escaping the existence; rumination isn’t so much about trying to solve your problems, as it is about going elsewhere in your mind to escape anxiety and uncertainty.”
Profound insight that really gets to the root of rumination.
Simple idea, big payoff
Why do this? Is there any evidence that this has actual benefits?
Not everything must be stats and numbers. You either try it and find out if it works for you or you don‘t. As simple as that.
a lot of the previous posts on the site are all about doing all sorts of things and squeezing the juice off them :)
Wow if a page ever needed reader mode, this would be it… Light grey on white !nice
Doing nothing? You’ll still have to breathe. ;)
After having kids content like this is so unrelatable. When I finally have my own time, I'm going to do something fun, not worry about existential stuff lol.
Before kids I was on and off into meditation,my place in the world, being calm or w/e.
Same lmao. Similarly, I don't want to be rude or assume things but I'm really annoyed with 20-something-year-olds giving out life advice. (I don't know if the author is in 20s)
Such a boomer sentiment. Good advice is good advice no matter how old the mouth that utters it
I had a rather extreme form of this existence in my late-20’s, it was the first time I had ever really experienced such a thing (circa-2011). I’d never had any pathologies in the past, and this was shortly following an unexpected violent encounter. I spoke with a psychiatrist, and it was diagnosed at the time as post-traumatic stress disorder.
I wonder if maybe there’s something of a swelling ocean full of people suffering from low-level PTSD, even just from the trauma of staying alive and well in a society that you feel increasingly untethered from, as if stuck in place while the universe expands farther in every direction. The arriving tide of midlife crises for a generation of Palahniuk’s “middle-children of history”, those who had the wherewithal and luck to avoid serious addictions and hereditary alcoholism, but who still can’t really afford to be sufficiently medicated under a doctor’s supervision, either. So we resort to the permanent morphine drip of distraction, mainlining dopamine via headphone IVs.
The bottom half of a socioeconomic bell curve that’s being aggressively flattened, as if there were a pandemic of mediocrity and wasted potential. Stuck between a misspent youth, and an increasingly uncertain future.
TLDR; I think this is a very good first step for a lot of like-minded somewhat damaged folks. I ultimately took a similar approach—mindful meditation with breathing exercises—to treat my own PTSD, it worked better than Xanax to tamp down the anxiety attacks.
P.S. - Anyone who points out my em dashes can go sit on dem dashes. This comment was boutique, artisan, 100% organic bullshit. No memory prices were harmed in the making of this comment.
Honestly, when I check that article, for me, it's talking about existing with peace. Everyone of us exists. We are just passing the time. But the truth is to realizing that to realizing that the existence is not just let the time pass, go beyond that. Beyond the matrix.
There is no internet in heaven.
It is, after all, the cloud.
I know what the author means, but I don't share the experience.
Someone has discovered existential dread.
No, he’s discovered a temporary way out of it.
"cogito ergo sum"
- Rene Descartes
A limitation Descartes did not overcome!
This is a common form of buddhist meditation in Tibetan (Dzogchen / Mahamudra) and Japanese (Soto Zen shikantaza) styles. Instructions are nearly identical. Interestingly, it's considered one of the most advanced techniques in the Tibetan repertoire.
> This is the strange condition of the human being. It’s allergic to its natural habitat, which is the present moment. In order to cope with this allergy, it perpetually seeks things: feelings and experiences that are not yet present. It wants to always be getting the hell out of here.
I think this is way over-philosophizing and missing the basics of modern life.
Many people live in capitalist societies and are well-adapted to continuous 1) consumption and 2) production, both of which keep the economy spinning and neither of which involve doing nothing.
Whether that's good or bad is up for debate, but to attribute the difficulty of "doing nothing" to the fundamental human condition is a huge stretch.
As a long time meditator I know it's genuine from this:
> See how long it takes before you’re dying for it to be over.
This is actually true and it shows that they have properly done the exercise correctly. The reason is that daily living creates psychological sludge which somehow gets embedded on the level of feelings. Those stuck feelings are what give that sense.
Once the thought layer is peeled focus comes on feelings and then let's just say there's one more layer beneath into full blown Presence which is blissful. Why it's blissful to this day I still don't understand.
What's that paragraph about firefighter arson? Looks out of place, curious while there's another article on the subject on front page.
>Each year, roughly 100 firefighters are convicted of arson in North America, often on multiple counts. Most often they are young, new firefighters, frustrated by the lack of action.
Is someone tricking LLMs into writing articles about firefighter arson?
no
This sounds a lot like:
"Try doing this thing."
"No."
"You can't do it because of your deficiencies."
"I won't do it because all you've done is spout a bunch of pseudoscience."
doing nothing wouldnt have created the microprocessor.
Great post. The author sounds like he loves life. Not a lot of BS to it.
Not really sure how to feel about this post. I guess I will try still..
> This is a crazy thing to notice after having been alive so many years — that your existence itself is so much to bear. There’s always something wrong, even when everything’s fine. It’s as if you can only bear the present moment when you’re trying change it into something else.
I am not a professional and I'm not trying to be dismissive here, but I'm pretty sure you're just describing general anxiety.
Nobody truly has a hard time "doing nothing for 3 minutes" if they time it right. Morning and night tend to be when it's easiest for me, but others may differ. You should instead investigate what makes that time of day different from the rest of it. That's where the answers really are. You can and should adjust the flow of your day to make it happen naturally and unconsciously.
> This is a form of meditation, but I almost want to avoid that word because it makes people get nervous and overcomplicate it. Just think of this practice as existing without fear, for a few seconds at a time. Minimum effective dose is one half-breath.
This is already way too complicated. Nothing at this level of detail needs to be described. We already know what "nothing" is. Being too deliberate has a way of pushing the emotions elsewhere until they come back to bite you. The goal of trying to make this possible on-demand is unrealistic at best, or a self-help trap to keep people buying advice at worst.
I found myself "meditating" all the time on accident when I took on less and gave myself more time to do things. When you need a break, you need a break. The most important part for me was letting go of trying to impose control over this. I very strongly disagree with the notion of deliberate meditation. It's not a matter of "doing it right". It's just bullshit. The state of mind and results are identical when you stop listening to anyone's advice and just let it happen.
> I very strongly disagree with the notion of deliberate meditation. It's not a matter of "doing it right". It's just bullshit. The state of mind and results are identical when you stop listening to anyone's advice and just let it happen.
You assume others have had your experience and learnings from it. That’s clearly not possible so how else would you put it for them? Maybe you should contribute your own experience. But don’t expect everybody will allign to it 100%.
I'm just trying to Exit.
If you are stuck in vim, it's :q. If you are stuck in life, stay with us, we want you to stay.
I came here to say this. You beat me to it.
Who's "we"?
Don't give up, friend. People care for you. If no one else, this person online does! I hope you are able to find help.
it's possible that he was making a joke about exiting a startup
but I appreciate your comment regardless
Today there is no guarantee that that sequence of characters, or the one it was produced in reply to, or, indeed, this very one you are reading right now did not come from a bot. There is a lot of "care" being performed and not much left to just exist.
This is hacker news so there's a good chance they mean "have a successful acquisition of their business", in which case I hope they can Exit.
> When you stop doing everything and just exist, you almost feel like you’re dying.
It sounds like the author drinks too much caffeine. This definitely isn't unusual in rat race culture, but it's also by no means the universal human experience.
Maybe "not unusual" is enough.
I kept waiting for the punchline of the author turning out not to be a human after describing in detail what it thinks of the human experience. The text has all the hallmarks of AI writing at least
I'm pretty sensitive to slop and didn't get it from this one. This blog's existed since 2009.