Nothing: Simply Do Nothing
usenothing.com
usenothing.com
All senses get stimulated, a moving mind in a moving body. The great outdoors, fresh air, i shite being Scottish.
If you have a problem you need to solve, but don't know how, just walk up to a overview point and look down on the problem every day.
On a walk, you can still carry and even use a phone, listen to a podcast or music, or have a conversation. When you're doing a workout, you might wear a watch, but otherwise it's a time when you can't really get distracted or interrupted by anything, you just move, observe, and think.
When I cycle, the first twenty kilometers are usually fairly painful: I am tired, I feel my knees, back, and muscles hurt, and am generally uncomfortable. After those twenty kilometers I enter a meditative, gelatinous phase, were I no longer really feel my body. I just ride. This is when I _think_; the same style of thinking I experience when lying, comfortably, in bed.
After maybe 60–90 kilometers (depending on my current fitness level), I enter the pain stage. This is when I start feeling my body again. Believe it or not, this is definitely the most therapeutic stage. This is when I cannot think. My mind stays blank, and I do — in a manner of speaking — nothing.
This lack of thought, meaning lack of stress, of worry, of hectic, etc., is what motivates me to go on 150 or 200 kilometer bike rides. You feel physically refreshed and exhausted. You feel that you were able to think in peace and purely, as well as having been void of all negative, stressful thoughts.
To anyone who has never tried an endurance sport like cycling: I highly recommend it. I started when I was 14, and it was one of the greatest decisions I ever made. It spared me hours of depression, fear, and stress. It also encouraged me to think and meditate in peace. I would not be the person I am today, if it were not for my dear high-school friend who showed me the world of cycling (as well as the world of communism; I owe much to this friend). Thank you.
Writer Haruki Murakami, a distance runner, was asked by an interviewer what we thinks about when he runs. Murakami responded that he basically doesn't think of anything. He runs not to think, but to _not_ think. That He runs specifically to create a void. (from his book "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running")
I would also encourage anyone who hasn't experienced this before: find an activity that demands this from you. You will learn a lot about yourself.
Riding for 7-8 hours even once a week just gave me a boost that would let me cope with everything that I had to face in daily life, and now after I've diagnosed with ADHD, I realize it was also helped me a lot to keep myself somewhat sorted. It's kinda therapy for me.
It's relaxing, and clams the racing mind so much.
Now I don't get a chance to ride anymore, but I miss it so much. And I feel ADHD affects me more now
Also it's perfect most of our "winter", unlike many places where it snows / gets too cold.
No place other than California will have perfect weather all year, but then you live in California...
During the summer my wife and I run inside, or very early in the morning outside.
I say this to demonstrate how un-adapted we are now for what is relatively recently a radically different lifestyle.
Take walks to stimulate the mind
Yes, it wasn't as affordable in earlier times, but thinking and walking have been closely associated for millenia.
Thinking in peace and quiet was indeed a luxury in past times.
That doesn't mean there isn't a long tradition of walking if you needed to think. And that was the core point of OP - not that the majority was focused on survival, but that supposedly thinking and walking are a new relationship, previously impossible. And they really aren't. (Even as a subsistence farmer, you occasionally have to think, and doing that during a walk is a pretty common approach)
Not quite, the relationship between walking and thinking is more salient now. Not previously impossible.
Note OP cites examples of walking that are all practical. Poetically OP states this as a way to "find" answers. That element of finding is no longer a necessity like it used, but arguably taking the time and the method are still important.
Quoting OP: " Walking is what our ancestors did, to go into "finding" modus. Find a route to water, find prey, find adversaries to find you and find out. Or at least find the way home."
My points are nuanced and being strawmanned.
(1) energy scarcity makes walking for leisure less attractive. Can't just pound a bag of chips.
(2) because of the necessity to be active, the time to think and be still was more baked into human lifestyle. Further making explicit intention to do nothing, quietly walk less needed.
(3) our current lifestyle tends to be the opposite of (1) & (2). We can readily get cookies (high calorie foods) and don't have movement baked in.
(4) humans are evolved for (1) & (2). That we are at (3), and are not adapted for that lifestyle, underscores why leisure walks would be more important now than ever before.
~ Kurt Vonnegut
First of all, the argument conflates hunter gatherers, nomadic tribes, and farming societies. The mean and variance in food supply in all three across the world and time varied quite a bit. Were the numbers so bad uniformly that people had no time for leisure activity!?!
Across history, there is evidence of people having huge celebratory festivals, involving excess food, dancing, and other rituals. People have been building for thousands of years humongous temples and pyramids and other structures requiring decades of continuous work, most of them without slave labor but voluntarily. Spending significant part of the day praying to the gods has also been the hallmark of humans. Do any of these strike you as low energy activities?
Or take a look at biology. Most animals with some intelligence spends a non-trivial amount of its time in play. Why would humans not?
While "simple", that does not equate to abundant nor easy. Or, would you agree that there was plenty of abundance even during northern winters?
If there was such abundance, and things were as simple as hunting every now and then- why so many famines in history [1]? Surely any cause of famine could be remediated by going out and doing a little more hunting?
I believe noting that simple is not easy was my point already: "While "simple", that does not equate to abundant nor easy"
Which goes to my other point - getting food on your own is hard. Doing so in the winter is even more difficult. Hence, calorie deficits was a serious problem for many.
(1) in famines, it is the muscular men that die first, followed by the muscular women, then men die and finally women (essentially follows the ratio of calorie demands to fat reserves)
(2) natural selection can be a bit random. Those that survive a disease might not be the most fit, just immune. Natural selection does not necessarily select for a globally optimal population, just local maxima. For example, all those surviving might also have some negative trait that would then be present in all of the surviving population.
I find those two points very interesting and thought I would share them.
I feel you completely discounted this: "Our ancestors would have been lean and would not have typically expended energy for just pure leisure." And instead responded to only the following simplification as if it were an absolute point: "In other words, everyone was busy trying to not starve"
Though, let us both stop nitpicking. It is hard to convey the full nuance, particularly when tapping this out on a phone.
In fairness, I did conflate a few concepts and did not convey some nuance. Though my point that humans are not adapted for our current lifestyle remains.
(1) serfs were not voluntarily lifting weights for leisure.
(2) humans were not historically jacked. They were lean. They looked like thru-hikers, or marathon runners. It is the reason why having fat was a beauty standard. Onky the rich could have that many excess calories and not be M tan from working. The body does not choose to put on unnecessary levels of muscle without training and constant nutrition
I did not mean to convey as was read into my statements that humans did zero leisure. It is an absurd claim. Though, running a marathon for the hell of it is likely well out of the cards for most people, particularly in a winter climate. To which my point, the need to go for intentional walks was less than what it is today. Not zero, but less.
As for the conflation, the lack of nutrition was particularly salient in WWII when most Americans were not getting enough calories.
"LeBlanc argues that the U.S. military’s interest in nutrition research exploded in the 1940s, after it began seeking healthy recruits to deploy in World War II and found a male population physically weakened by years of malnutrition during the Great Depression." [1]
Celebrating during a harvest makes sense. A lot of that food is liable to go bad. It is a time of plenty,in contrast to long winters before canning was invented.
My point is the need for recreational leisure amongst adults was less than compared to present day in "post industrial countries" for two reasons: (1) substance living intrinsically involves physical activity. (2) food scarcity. Yeah, it is easy to strawman my argument as if there was no excess expenditure of energy. I'll re-iterate my point is that subsistance living is not conducive to a lot of excess calorie expenditure. Second to that, the number of people who were at a subsistence level was historically far higher. Third, a lifestyle where time is measured more in months and seasons, where one needs to do "everything" manually - is fundamentally different then the lifestyles of today (where with $100, today you can eat as well as did the King of France)
[1] https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2019/01/historian-traces-m...
I think the leisure walking, jogging, gym are all products of availability of too much food in return for less work. We are simulating work by cheating the body to think that these leisure activities are actually work.
Because it gives you a chance to think about what you _really_ must be doing instead of what you were doing that led to wanting to calm the mind by doing nothing.
And what were you doing that made the mind "empty calorie"-style busy?
Usually getting lost in youtube videos or social media doomscrolling.
One minor improvement idea: get rid of the timer during the nothing phase. I looked at it all the time.
You could show the timer once someone starts scrolling again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8An2SxNFvmU [Do Nothing - a message of motivation from Self-help Singh- (un) motivational speaker and life coach]
I've known people that 'do nothing'. The modern day equivalent of that is the pot head. It's a lot easier to do nothing when you're stoned. The other alternative is the basement dweller kid of a well to do couple that just spends his day playing video games. Due to his parent's hard work (or luck), he can probably afford to do so for the rest of his life. But still seems depressing to me to think about.
"The world is fucked, and you cannot un-fuck it."
"You will die one day just as confused as you are now."
"Everything you think you need to do was done before you and will be done after you."
"Whether you are fat or thin haters will hate."
"Nothing really matters."
There are some really deep insights in all of those thoughts, thanks for sharing.
PS: this remembers me of a sketch about giraffes being an animal created by a gay friend of the comedian, after the sketch I learned that giraffes engage in male-male acts more often than male-female acts and got mindblown. They have been called "especially gay" for this fact.
Something I'd have never been introduced to without your comment, thank you.
Even not spending time or money has to be worth something. Why do nothing if I can't measure the benefits.
Another example of this could be in the adoption of "Mindfulness" vs meditation. Mindfulness is a useful thing it can be measured and it has an industry behind it.
It's a philosophy that we see more and more in every part of our lives.
Consider art or poetry. Did people make art to be measured or to be useful?
Fwiw: "Utilitarianism is a theory of morality that advocates actions that foster happiness or pleasure and oppose actions that cause unhappiness or harm. When directed toward making social, economic, or political decisions, a utilitarian philosophy would aim for the betterment of society as a whole."
Quite often to put food on the table, or for clout. There’s an intrinsic desire to create, sure, but there’s also a cultural context in which art is valued and certain kinds of art are valued more at different times or in different places.
I suppose it’s splitting hairs to say that art has some use both for the creator and the consumer, because it’s not the same kind of use you mean.
It’s just that when I dig in to “useful” vs “useless” endevours there’s often no clear line between them.
It may tasteless to you, but most people are just trying to achieve those material terms as efficiently as possible.
How would you even determine how much you need? You labor under the illusion that you're an intelligent being. Evolution does not care about "enough"... because there is no way to determine what "enough" is. What is enough today will not help you survive tomorrow's famine. Best stock up now. If you were so smart, you'd get that. What others call greed is subconscious anticipation of calamity.
> What is enough today will not help you survive tomorrow's famine.
Tomorrow's famine will be caused by you (read: those behaving as you describe) not knowing when enough is enough. Best preserve what we have, rather than waste it all in a frantic bid for number-goes-up.
Possibly. Or maybe it will happen anyway.
> (read: those behaving as you describe)
That's mostly leftist moralizing on your part.
• If you wish yourself maximal reproductive fitness, then all humanity will be your descendants, and the next few centuries of all human interest is your interest.
• The iterated prisoner's dilemma is a classic economic argument, by which Tragedy of the Commons-type behaviours can be averted. (Garrett Hardin's 1968 paper is a load of nonsense.)
I'm not sure what would contrast my earlier "leftist moralizing", because I have absolutely no idea what a leftist is.
Religionists never think their religion is wrong. But I don't belong to your cult.
> because I have absolutely no idea what a leftist is.
Leftists never have any idea what a leftist is. But I don't belong to your cult.
I mean I get it, idle / factory games are one of my vices. But I won't let it control my existence.
Someone needs to update it for mobile and dark mode though.
https://gist.github.com/lifthrasiir/f46725d3e9e9d055da40b3de...
I know almost nothing about web dev, but that looked like a nice quick challenge. So I spent maybe 20 minutes to get it 90% there. It's missing a portion of text below the timer and a toast. 1948 bytes
https://gist.github.com/Archargelod/d121ae5377a0d09b0133b7b0...
Or am I missing something?
"There is no reward for lingering. Just the pleasure of simple being."
If you're looking for something that rewards you for doing nothing on the other hand, your favorite IRC server probably has an #idleRPG channel to join
The world does not want to connect with me. The world is in many subtle ways actively trying to kill me, harm me, and reduce me. If I'm taking time off it's for myself.
> rebellion against the incessant noise of modern life, which demands constant action.
So does my own body. Eventually I'm going to get hungry no matter how much nothing I do. Having stillness of mind allows purpose of action. You've got it all backwards.
Reward: the numbers go up. Almost like idle clicker games, but without clicking.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/style/rawdog-flights-term...
(I use it as a meditation timer.)
For sitting and doing nothing as a group activity, I made Sit Together: https://untested.sonnet.io/Sit.%2C+(together)+devlog+002+–+S...
Big respect to the dedication.
The non-action of the wise man is not inaction.
It is not studied. It is not shaken by anything.
The sage is quiet because he is not moved,
Not because he wills to be quiet.
Off Topic: Since it linked to GitHub. I clicked. Than my 1st thought was, "This must be a web learning project for the author." Otherwise this page could be made in 1 .html page instead of 50+ files present in the repository!
I think it's brilliant site, you visit the site or share it with someone, read the text, it make you feel grounded and even spark something inside you that you forget in the busy day.
Walking is cool, but it's definitely different from be still and doing nothing. Sometimes you go to walk, but your mind still racing from all the things that you want to escape, which doesn't help at all, because the point of all this is doing NOTHING, yes, even daydreaming. Your just lightly aware of your mind and self in the now, and that's all, no thought, just like meditation.
I wrote an app with a friend about 10 years ago where we used the headset and the python mindwave library [2]. The app displays a longer and longer spiral on screen when you aren't thinking about anything.
[1] The headset seems to still exist in some form: https://store.neurosky.com/pages/mindwave [2] https://github.com/faturita/python-mindwave
Meet people where they are, and make it as easy as possible to start doing something
Sometimes to get an idea of something you should simply stop thinking.
No wonder people watch TV, fight wars, or build startups to forget that.
Not a put down at all, just that our strange little world has come to this.
But this also borders on asceticism - the practice of letting go of worldly things, in pursuit of higher learning.
There's this movement to reintroduce millenial traditions of mindfulness into our lives under the guise of modern secularism. I am not convinced that removing its original context is as wise as it's purported. So many old traditions focus on lineage for a reason, and it is something we're too quick to do away with in society.
Most meditation practices come along with a warning, that doing this type of work can lead to results that you need proper preparation for. At the very least you need proper intentionality, and doing them incorrectly can lead to neuroticism and in some cases breakdowns and dissociation.
Good luck with all your nothings.
Edit : nope, you just scrolled the page :) [0]
[0] : https://github.com/remvze/nothing/blob/5402ae06169c67bdfa8b6...
What brought you to meditation in the first place? Stress, anxiety, resentment, insecurity. Instead of reconciliation, meditation brings more isolation and brooding.
Meditation is narcissistic.
Meditation is a tool, and it can be pointed to many aims. Without the right aims, it can lead you to reinforce things you don't want to like you describe. It can also lead you to dissociate, or to exacerbate latent neurosis. However, it can also be a life affirming method for being more present and less hung up on the vicissitudes of the anxiety producing nature of an impermanent world. It takes wisdom to use it for the latter.
I'm calling attention to value, virtue, beauty, etc. Someone who is telling you that prayer is bad while meditation is good, or that religion is bad while secular mindfulness is good -- they are telling you to focus on yourself instead of something or someone else.
- Share you highest score with friends.
- Set a reminder
- a “don’t break the chain” calendar in the background
When done perfectly correctly, consciously breathing nets the same benefits to the body as unconscious or automatic breathing. You don't really have to spend any mental energy on it to get the oxygen you need (your body will even yawn for you if it needs more).
I think there is a way to find the ease and harmony in most things, or, the "automatic modes". You can design your life in such a way that you're essentially doing nothing, but to others you appear to be involved in everything.
I can only imagine what it would be like to stop paddling and see that I am still in motion, to be able to exhale and do nothing.
I was taught that this is not entirely true : your automatic breathing is influenced by your morphology, your posture, your current levels of energy, and your current emotions. And it sounds like the feedback loop can go reverse : intentionally breathing have an impact on your posture, your level of energy and your emotion.
I have no source to support my claims so don’t take my words as any truth, that’s just a belief multiple people shared to me including my doctor.
But I do feel like intentional breathing have a direct impact on my levels of anxiety. Not magic, but useful.
People often wonder what advice they would give their younger self. This would be it for me.
It something seems too difficult, it is likely because you are still struggling with a pre-requisite. Go back to working on the previous foundation until your mastery is complete.
This is true for work, mental & fitness progress.
I.e. if you find losing weight hard, you probably need to improve your diet (not to lose weight, but to find healthy food you enjoy enough to become a self-reinforcing habit).
Don’t try to improve your diet in order to lose weight. That is trying to solve two big things, on two different levels, at once.
This may take a while, but eventually you can find your way to an exceptionally healthy diet you like too much to require any discipline to stay on.
That is a health foundation of lasting value. And with that foundatiin, when you try to lose weight again, it is much easier.
Likewise, if you find it is hard to improve your diet, even in increments, perhaps you are fatigued? You may need to improve your sleep routine until you are habitually not tired.
For some of us, that might take a lot of work. But focusing on it, instead of downstream efforts will pay off.
Etc.
Foundations should be iterated on until they are self-perpetuatingly solid. Then the next thing will be much easier.
Math and physics are mental versions.
The result for any path: Go slow (iterate & explore to complete fluency & habit) to go fast (compounding instead of linear gains in understanding & progress).
There's no such thing. Eating only 50 avocados a day (so called "superfood") won't get you healthy or make you lose weight.
Too much of anything is not healthy.
A "healthy diet" is matched up with your body, short- and long-term needs, activities, mental state, etc.
I do agree with the suggested approach for achieving anything significant, just nitpicking on some of the language in your dieting example.
You have lost me. I said a healthy diet you love.
So critiquing me as suggesting anything that is not a healthy diet seems odd.
A healthy diet can be created many ways, all involve a lot of variety.
But it can be convenient too. If you find the right mix (for your own tastes) of “superfoods” as a foundation. I.e. hummus, mixed greens, mixed berries, a mix of nuts, a mix of seeds, sardines, salmon & tuna (but not too much), eggs, etc.
If your fridge, pantry, and eating habits cover all your basic nutrition multiple ways by default, then adding a variety of other healthy foods can be done very spontaneously without any need for planning.
I know, it took me a few years, and a lot of iteration, but it would be hard to beat my diet.
Even my snacks are up there, like edamame, chocolate in moderation, fresh veggies, high protein low sugar ice cream, etc.
Achieving healthy autopilot is the point.
Even with the "right mix", if you eat 5x the amount your lifestyle and body and mind need, you ain't ever going to lose weight or get to a healthy state. Obese people are (usually) obese because they eat too much, not just because of the type of food they eat. Heck, today both keto and vegan are considered "healthy" and they are on the opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to diet choices.
I am basically arguing that, to an extent, it's more important how much you eat, vs what you eat. Again, this is all comparative (eg. eating McDonalds burgers for the rest of your life is "healthy" compared to not eating anything at all, but that's a useless distinction).
Plenty of people in the past have eaten "unhealthy" (white bread, fried meat and vegetables) yet didn't have an obesity or health problem, because they countered that with a balanced activity (physical work) and mental load (shared responsibilities).
So my point is that you should reach that "autopilot" on the amount of the food you get, and then you can be pretty liberal in how you achieve it (obviously, don't have chocolate for breakfast, lunch and dinner). I do agree getting to the autopilot is where you should put your effort to.
There isn’t a diet that works for everyone in both health & physical & psychological diet needs
The point is always making progress. Accumulating foods that work better. So learn and continually try things.
Anyone can make progress, that is beneficial.
I am still making progress, in food quality & convenience, which blows my mind.
And I don’t doubt there are medical and mental issues that need more than a healthy diet intervention
But that doesn’t eliminate the benefits from being healthier, easier.
You don’t know how much eating healthier automatically will impact seemingly independent or counter issues until trying. A sustained changed diet changes our responses to food physically & mentally in significant & positive ways.
My diet has changed me.
From the get go, I only challenged the notion that the main issue for people who want to lose weight is the type of the food they eat, but instead, the amount of the food they eat.
It seems like we are arguing past each other though :)
We still don't know why people (or various mammals) yawn.
I listened to a "Science Vs" podcast on it (or perhaps it was "unexplainable"), yawning is not yo increase oxygen levels. Study participants sat in an oxygen enriched room and also a depleted room without a change in yawn rates.
What did affect yawn rates was brain temperature. Yawning lowers brain temperature. Importantly, when ambient temperature is higher than body temperature, yawn rate dramatically goes down.
These resource [1] [2] goes into some of the details if you want to skip listening to the podcast
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/scienc...