Ready!…Set!…Slow.

Or: The Loafer’s Way, Part 2.

Last Sunday marked the start of Slow Down Week and in the spirit of the thing, I’m blogging about it a bit late.

Before you read any further, please mosey over to the Adbuster’s home page and watch the Slow Down Week video. (Fear not, hurryaholics, it’s short.)

OK. How many of us watched that cartoon and felt the irresistable urge to start talking like Alvin the Chipmunk?

As some of you may remember, I blogged last summer about rediscovering the wisdom of doing nothing after reading How To Be Idle: The Loafer’s Manifesto by Tom Hodgkinson.

I confess, however, that though I’ve reaped the many benefits of idleness since then, I haven’t always been able to resist the twin temptations Consume and Hurry, and their red-headed step-sister, Worry.

But I’m not a quitter! I mean, I really want to be. So thank dog I had a new tome from Hodgkinson to see me through the hard times. It’s called The Freedom Manifesto: How to Free Yourself from Anxiety, Fear, Mortgages, Money, Guilt, Debt, Government, Boredom, Supermarkets, Bills, Melancholy, Pain, Depression, Work, and Waste and I think one should be in every hotel bedside table. Tom’s funny, insightful essays will inspire you to sit on your ass as much as you can afford (which is much more than you think), and stop buying into the belief that Things make you happy.

Sometimes though, picking up a book is too much effort, so surf over to Slow Down Now, the Idler’s kissing cousin and home to the International Institute of Not Doing Much (IINDM). This site has several great articles, though predictably, it’s not updated too often. I am especially intrigued by one article’s plea for more compassion for women, who are naturally better multi-taskers than men and thus more morally suspect.

Far be it from me to make sweeping generalizations, but it is true that women’s superior corpus collosum does enable us to leave men in the dust when it comes to doing more than one thing at a time, even when those things are related to the same project. Virtually every month, for example, I must remind Kevin that putting the mop and bucket back in the closet is just as much a part of “Mopping The Kitchen” as taking it out.

Multi-tasking is, in fact, a very Darwinian skill. Those who could keep their babies from falling into the river (or otherwise killing themselves) whilst simultaneously foraging for food for the family were the ones who survived. (Men just rode in on their coat tails.) But I do agree that in our society this useful skill has morphed into a murderous monster, as evidenced by the staggering number of people who think nothing of getting dressed, brushing their teeth, texting their office, and pulling a cappucino during their morning drive to work.

There’s a ton of thought-provoking stuff like this on Slow Down Now and in Hodgkinson’s books, and I’ll admit that part of me - the intellectually curious, energetic part - is itching to debate them all here. But then I think, “That’s a lot of work. And what would I get from typing my fingers to the bone? Boney fingers.”

Which is not to say that there is no intrinsic value in work, productivity, or intellectual curiosity. There is. But we have gotten so far out of balance with our concept of “productivity” that what we actually DO do ends up having less and less value.

It’s the Quantity Over Quality Syndrome and the cure is three-fold: prioritization, focus, and letting go of the need to control the future - aka worry. More than anything, it’s been the not-worrying that has gnawed away most successfully at the ties that bind me.

On NPR last week, a “stress expert”¹ said that it is actually the anticipation of bad things that causes most of our stress. Studies show that when that “bad thing” actually happens, we feel virtually no stress at all.

Translation: Much of our stress is self-created. Sounds like a bad habit to me. Why not at least try to break it?

I just realized I’m exhausted after slaving over this long post about doing nothing. I think I’ll crawl under my desk for a nap. Wake me up when the Slow week is over.

1. Ominous-sounding job, don’t you think? [↩]