On "Doing Nothing"

I have often been accused of slacking. When I wrote my first blog , people were always saying to me, "So . . . you write one blog a week ?" They wouldn't come right out and say the rest of what they were thinking, which was: "And how long does that take you ? Two hours a week ?" But I knew. What these people failed to understand is that the hard part of writing is not the typing part, but the thinking part. If you were to come into my office, you would most likely see me engaged in some activity that did not appear, to your untrained eye, to be some sort of work. You might see me clipping my toenails, or exploring the vast information resources of the Internet, such as the site that tells you who was the highest scorer in the current cricket series or which song was No. 1 on the record charts on any given day for the past 1 year . Or you might see me thrashing around with my empty tea cup in my futile but ongoing (for nearly two decades) attempt to score a century .

You'd probably think I was slacking. But you would be wrong. Because while I am engaged in these seemingly pointless activities, I am thinking about a critical writing issue, such as: Which is a funnier-sounding mineral name, feldspar or potash? It takes hours of grueling mental effort to solve that kind of problem, but you, the reader, see only the finished product (feldspar).

Another example which is quite in the news today is The Federal Reserve cut its benchmark federal funds rate from 5.25% to 4.75%.One would think the Federal Reserve Board. It doesn't appear to do much. Every six months or so, it raises or lowers the prime interest rate by maybe a quarter of a percent. You think: How hard can that be? You could do that without ever leaving the golf course! Yet if you asked the members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, I bet they'd tell you it's a lot of work.

I suspect that most people — like me and the Federal Reserve Board — think they work pretty hard. But it isn't always easy to tell the difference between working and slacking, especially in the modern corporate culture ( ethics ) , where relatively very few people do something which can be inarguably coined as "work" , such as going down into a coal mine and coming back up with pieces of actual coal. A lot of us would have to admit that it would have been a minimal effect on any heck of what so ever , if we skipped a day or two of "work," or even a couple of months, or maybe even three or four years.The only effect would have been we would have missed our paychecks.


So the question is: What is work? Why do we work? Is it a moral duty, or do we do it only because we have to? Is it O.K. to not work if we can get away with it? Do we resent those who are able to slack? Or do we envy them?

These are some of the questions that comes to my mind when i decide that i would take a year off before i can start working again so that i can spend my time lying on couch watching TV , getting up when ever i want and go to bed when i need to.

Summerarily I just want to "Do Nothing".


These two contrasting views of work, that have remained with us across the centuries. People all around preach work ethics for the sake of it and thats why
( unfortunately ) the sect believing in "Work" has always dominated, but the slackers' undercurrent has always been there, and has always resonated with the public who dont hide what they think. But much to our surprise the recent trends suggest that this undercurrent is getting projected as a popular culture.


I may conclude that most of us are both workaholic and slacker — "we all tend to embody a bit of both ends of the spectrum." We feel we work too hard, but also that we fritter away much of our time. We scorn the lazy and unproductive, but we long to win the lottery so we can hit the jackpot ourselves. We criticize our kids for doing exactly what we did when we were their age.

we need slackers, who serve "as a goad to examining our relation to work, as a role to adopt while finding our relation to work, as a critique of our culture's twisty relation to work and to leisure, and as a celebration of the same.

"Doing Nothing," now inspires me and leaves me with a deeper appreciation for the value of not working. In fact, I wish I could do more of it. Alas,
I cannot: these toenails aren't going to clip themselves. would they ??