Do Nothing (To)Day: A Manifesto of "Irresponsibility"

"Don't just do something! Sit there." (Sylvia Boorstein)


It is thirty-five years later, and we are worried. Thirty five years later, everything is changed, and nothing has changed. We--the vast majority of us--cannot feel like we are waiting on the cusp of change for anything good anymore, nationally or locally, or that things are about to break in our direction. (The next national phase will be another war on something. The next local development will be another box store that shuts down a half-dozen local businesses.) Even as our technology, our science and our practical arts have caused us--for those paying attention--to know much more about who we are as a species and a culture, our institutions and our commerce apply what we've learned to our daily experience far, far less. The ideology of Capitalist Individualism rides taller in the saddle than ever before in recent memory.


In our day--unlike in those ancient and heady former times, standing even then at the beginning of the present slide--little out of the ordinary is seen in taking off from a successful stockbroker's career to pursue a program of personal growth like we read about in Powers of Mind (by "Adam Smith")--as long as one has enough of the good stuff, of course, chiefly money. Like high storm-waves that have reached far up the beach to rearrange the flotsam and jetsam for another season, the social revolution has touched the well-to-do, then, for the "stepping out" retreat happens all the time, now, for those who want and can afford that particular version of the success story. In the very same moment, though, the storm having passed, and the seas all calm again, ordinary people, doing ordinary, time- and life-stealing, soul-destroying, repetitive jobs live with levels of stress and dietary lapse that would have been common only to those at the very center of pill-popping uncertainty (in finance or combat) at the start of the last quarter of the 20th century, when the late-20th-century writer going by the nom-de-plume Adam Smith penned his screed.


A growing number of people alive now--mostly those for whom success within the status quo hasn't become a thick blanket of reassuring insulation--fully expect to be killed by drought, flood, earthquake, famine or by the consequences of social unrest following upon region-wide breakdown. The remainder pretend they don't know what they know, as they pour into and out of the latest release of the next big zombie or apocalyptic disaster movie. What point now, is there, for a renewed interest in self-exploration, meditation, mind-expanding experiences, except for something to read about as toys for the very rich, or to laugh at, pointing at the people wearing the funny clothes, or to sneer at as something the "hippys" do? (Or to be afraid: Those dark people dress different. Don't that mean they're some kinda terrorist?)


The rich and the very rich, and their toys... how could we ever forget to mention them? In the past 35 years, not just in the US, we've seen a massive upward movement of wealth into the rarified air of the very well-to-do, while the average person, who works longer, and harder, and is required to be paid less for it, has seen his or her wages stagnate, or even his or her job simply vanish. (For example, the richest percent of Americans now take home 24 percent of aggregate income, up from just under 9 percent in the 1970s.) Of course, these are not the rules for the 10 percent at the top who own 71 percent of the nation's wealth, or the 1 percent globally who own 40 percent of everything. These people manage to find lots of time. They manage to buy property where encroaching sprawl or strip development isn't the defining character of the landscape. They can afford to surround themselves with healthy greenery and immerse themselves in the challenge of arcane pursuits, concupiscent connoisseurship, Ultimate Athleticism, meditative retreat and experimental therapy.


Even if a person or ordinary means wanted step off, "tune in, turn on", and see where the adventure might go, what one among the mainstream middle-middle and lower classes would have the time to do it? (Sure, they can go out on the weekend to the nearest ski slope or amusement park, but that's not the same thing at all, is it? Nor is it meant to be.) The one asset everyone theoretically owns--the time that makes up his or her life--escapes, even for the upper-middle-class, by design, to-wit:

"Does the law say that you can only be required to work for 40 hours in a week without compensation for overtime? WE say to keep this high-status and well-paid job you will work for 50 hours or more, or you won't have it long…"

"Tired of the same old TV? With this plan--only $59.99 a month--you will enjoy high speed broadband internet and cable access to 600 channels of exciting programming…"


Yet, the hunger remains for something very different; for a different way of living (as much for active play, or something heard about from stories out of the lost past about community celebrations, as for a new way of working). Unlike the social scene three and a half decades ago, the bookstores, the internet and the broadcast media are full of stories about personal triumph over stultifying adversity (ending usually in a financially remunerative denouement) and advice about how anyone who really wants to change his or her life and circumstances, can. The hunger, expressed in books and services available for purchase, is there. Many feel called. Few go. Who is to blame the many who don't? They're being kept quite busy. Far easier it is to consider the successful break by the few as a consequence of special circumstances--which too often, once the full story is told, it is, for behind many an independent adventure stands a legacy, and inherited advantages that aren't just anyone's. (Again, who is to offer blame for this? At least when called, these were people who went.)


THE ubiquitous form of dissent for most of us at work is theft, mostly of time. In its rare and pure form, it would be to simply steal back all one's time by refusing to work all those assigned hours and choose to do something other than remain employed full time--and to pay the social and economic consequences for this choice of refusing to "work hard" after the acceptable fashion to those who feel they must choose to stay with the Plan in the coin of permanently living on the receiving end of social disdain and economic disadvantage. (The ones who most ardently enforce the "rule of work," inevitably come, to a man or woman, from either the blue-collar working class, who, having made a bad bargain, and having wasted the best years of their lives enriching someone else, know to their very core that, by god, no one else is going to be making a better deal, if they have anything to say about it, or from the ranks of the small businessperson: "What gives you the right to shirk, or to protest, or to have time?") The lesser rebellion, manifest in the working days of those too afraid to embrace this dissent in its greater form, is found in a hundred little acts against the requirements of routine--the email- and social network-checking or the cell-phone texting during working hours, the at-work internet shopping, the full participation in Steal Something From Work Day, the escapes to the privacy of the washroom to masturbate, the extended coffee-break posing as a meeting...


Of course, in its lesser form, such a rebellion remains mostly acquiescence. It affords little scope for a person to examine the metes and bounds of his or her own life, or to limn the depths and heights of conscious awareness. Or, to simply take a break and do nothing. Or, again, to stop and play with one's child, or a dog, at first with edgy impatience that Important Things Aren't Getting Done, but (if not given up on), with increasing interest in the experience of the here and the now that nearly all children or dogs know. THAT break--potentially the most revolutionary move of all, and the most threatening of all to society's governors and the behind-the-throne-standing representatives of the established social and economic order--remains out of reach. And seeing this, there has to be a slight revision in the notion of blame, mentioned before. Events have shown that it is possible to get Americans (this free people) to do almost anything, to put up with almost anything, as long as they can be made to feel afraid. Any blame in that, though certainly starting with the rot at the top, can be spread around to almost everyone. (So-called "mind work" might have something to interject, here, shedding light: Where resides the fear, the terror? Is it "out there" someplace, or is it inside the breast of each one of the fearful? If one refuses to act afraid, is one terrorized? What about the other way 'round?)


That's how we are different, now, from the heady days of the early 1970s.


How we are the same is much more simply said: We desperately need to change the course we are on. If anything, the urgency for this grows even more acute. The warnings on the fringe, back then, largely unheeded, are the problems, now, at the forefront of attention. What is to be done, certainly has political, and economic and social components, but the classic double-bind in which we seem to find ourselves, collectively, calls out for necessary personal change--what was once called, by the 'way-before' Victorians, a change of heart. (Of course what would be meant by a needed change of heart now would only somewhat overlap what was meant then, and would be much different than what would be meant by present-day authoritarian religious movements.)


There's a ethical principle which might be brought to bear, here, in choosing how to forge a different path, or to strike off in an unfamiliar direction: Those who can are the ones who ought. The ones who are able to make the break (or take a break), ought to lead the way, even at some cost, particularly if by doing so they are able to show an example as to how it is possible for a person of ordinary means to go about calling back what is missing. Certainly, the ones who can, ought to, in order to open and invite and to nourish a discussion of what is possible and how to go about the work and play of taking back our lives from the forces that would oppress us out of living them.


Obviously, a living has to be made, but the original idea has to have been (perhaps coming to us from before the advent of the agricultural surplus and the city, and along with these, slavery, aristocracy, and the permanent warrior class) that making a living is subordinate to actually living... An insight which goes back to the fear that the ones who rule would have us feel, the terror we are intended to respond to in characteristic ways (Save Us! O, Save Us!).

Perhaps if we were to make a round turn toward an old question again, with fresh experience, "How little might it be possible to get by on and stay healthy and content?" we might find the beginning of a solution to our problems.


Don't just do something. Sit there.