The Art of Doing Nothing

Creative people: Your culture needs YOU—to sit around and do nothing.

Sunlight in a cafeteria by Edward Hopper (1958)

The first instance of street art, which did not prompt a desire to choke on my vomit, forever turned my thoughts on that curious art form.

In a raffish Holborn pub, emblazoned on the bathroom tiling were the words: “Creative people need time to sit around and do nothing.”

As it happens, reader, I was sitting down. No need to belabour the details. The only reason I noticed this graffito was that I’d left my smartphone nestled beside my Old Fashioned on the bar. Panicked, I did what I had not done in aeons: I allowed my brain to percolate undistracted.

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Irony is the most human of features. Had I not forgotten my phone, I’d never have noticed the Sharpie graffito on the tiles. Worse yet, with my phone in hand, I’d have photographed the graffito, and posted it on Instagram, without absorbing its message. My chief concern: Do strangers like my plagiarised little witticism? Fifteen likes! Ugh. This is what heroin must feel like.

I digress. That photo would have competed for oxygen with reams of tinny recordings of concerts, documented by those whose primary concern is not the concert they’ve attended, but letting others know they attended the concert.

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Anyway, this lavatorial Lourdes got me thinking. When is the last time you permitted boredom to intrude upon your precious day? Lord. You may be reading this on a smartphone as you wait for a bus or a train or for your Tinder date (whose definition of six feet seems charitable) to return from the bathroom where he or she is scrolling through the same ephemera as yourself. Meanwhile, we are all expiring. Do we care?

In that authentic bar with the self-same décor, they play hits from before our times. At best, they tune out a modern hit based on a previous hit. In your tote bag rests a novel ‘reimagined’ (read: plagiarised) for this new age. That film everyone’s talking about? A redux of what came before. That hipster at the bar, swaddled in authenticity? His carbon copy hologram sits at the same bar in Paris, London, Milan—each rendition a screenshot of a screenshot.

No doubt, a man at the bar rocks a mullet, popularised in the 1970s. Another wears a Patrick Bateman slick-back, popularised in the 1980s. Another dons a Nirvana tee-shirt, popularised in the 1990s.

Back then, one could discern decades. Now every decade melds into the next. Each decade looks, smells, tastes, feels, sounds much like the last. History scrolls into itself. Was that 2009? Or 2019? Was that in the first season of The Sopranos? Or the last? As the Fight Club protagonist asks: Have I slept? Did I sleep? Have we binge-watched the last two decades? The blur is familiar.

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In the 1990s, creativity dipped its feet into concrete and ambled over London Bridge. Onwards from the 1970s, the famed Torrance Test recorded rising creativity. Rather ominously, researchers said it “just stopped.”

Professor K.H. Kim, of William and Mary College, sifted through nearly 300,000 creativity scores on the famed Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. She found that American creativity scores increased every year between 1966 and 1990. Then it stopped. Alarmingly, the sharpest decline is amongst elementary-age children from kindergarten through to sixth grade.

In her book, The Creativity Challenge, Kim is stark: “The bottom line is this: Americans are less creative today than they were twenty-five years ago. Furthermore, this decline continues with no end in sight—Americans continue to become less creative over time.”

Kim’s main gripe lies with exam-factory schools in which test scores loom like golems over teachers and students. Such schools prize box-ticking over learning. But it’s more complicated than that. Scientists think a combination of test-obsessed, outcome-focused schools alongside helicopter parenting, and safety culture, have conspired to dissolve the creativity brimming around children’s brains. From a young age, children strapped with Apple air tags and distrusted to swaddle down to the shop for a packet of smokes. And all of this started way before we, for what will soon be a patently insane endeavour, strapped smartphones to their palms.

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At risk of revealing a penchant for Ted Kaczynski’s earlier work, I’ll offer a thesis: Our age of anxiety prizes outcome over process. This prevailing angst strangles creativity, discovery—real life—at birth.

The result of our culture of anxiety and outcomes is the dearth of culture and the death of creativity. We reimagine novels, reimagine movies, rewrite books and plays. Why? Reimagining a novel is less risky than creating something new. Discovery requires uncertainty.

But our anxious culture abhors uncertainty in all of its forms. Glance the current ‘optimisation’ fetish for illustration. Apparently, if you’re not plunging into an ice bath at 4 a.m. you’re wasting your time here on Earth.

Since the 1990s, our culture has perfected and self-improved and obsessed and optimised. The result? Take one look at that viral ‘morning routine.’ With respect, the bloke spends four hours doing nothing of note. But the performance is the point.

From morning routines to dating apps, we have quantified life itself in the deluded hope of shaping a desired outcome. We’ve never been so modern. We’ve never been so medicated. A coincidence, I’m sure. For this reason, reader, we are what sociologists term fucked.

Screens, Dopamine, and the Doomscrolling of Thought

Or perhaps not. George Orwell, writing during a fractious time similar to—indeed, far worse than our own—had a point: “Take away freedom of speech and the creative faculties dry up.”

Naturally, an anxiety-riddled culture fears free speech and free expression for the same reasons a rabid hound fears water or your humble narrator fears the barman’s call for last orders.

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Boredom terrifies our screen-addicted culture. But boredom is not the same as emptiness—it is the soil from which creativity grows. Generation X, the last teenagers of real cultural zest, understood this intuitively. More slack time meant more imagination. To paraphrase Gordon Gekko: boredom is good.

We’ve since replaced reverie with reaction, attention with anxiety. Every moment is filled—scrolling, refreshing, retweeting—to stave off silence. But silence is where thought forms. Boredom stitches together novels and symphonies. It solves problems, incubates ideas. It gives the unconscious mind space to work. No one ever scrolled their way into genius.

Now, overstimulation is constant. The brain—still wired for bison hunts—short-circuits under the avalanche of ‘content.’

Books like Daily Rituals and Solitude remind us that the great minds cherished undisturbed time. Jung demanded silence during his morning walks, pretending not to see those who interrupted him.

Before Twitter, artists refused to talk their ideas to death, guarding them like seeds in winter. Our culture, by contrast, flings them into the dopamine void—where they perish on contact.

Creativity requires stillness. Our refusal to sit with discomfort, to endure the ordinary, has left us with a culture of novelty and noise. We’ve traded thought for spectacle. Process for product. True creation for content.

So perhaps the path back to creativity begins not with better time management apps or productivity hacks, but with something older. A walk. A nap. By sitting down and doing absolutely nothing.

As one bathroom Brecht put it: “Creative people need time to sit around and do nothing.”

And to that commandment, I raise my glass.

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