You can sit and do nothing

It's a valid option.

I have about an hour each night after my wife puts my daughter to sleep where I can do, for the most part, what I want. I typically fill this time with exercise, a late dinner, chores, or work. But the other night I had nothing immediately pressing to do. I’d done my chores, I wasn’t hungry, I’d exercised earlier that day, and my brain was completely spent for work-related thinking. So I instinctively ran through a short list of things that felt they’d be fun: Netflix, Youtube shorts, reading. When those didn’t stick, I ran through a list of things that could be a little more productive: finishing this month’s Atlantic issue, cleaning up some of our HR issues, writing.

Then it occurred to me that I could just sit. So I sat there, doing nothing at all.

And in my sitting, it became readily apparent to me that my mind was being completely directed by this persistent low grade buzz. What’s next? What’s next? What’s next? On the one hand, the crude pull to do more traditionally addictive things has always been quite clear — scroll endlessly on Youtube shorts! It’ll be fun! But for once, I noticed that those pulls were actually not so different from the compulsion to do more “productive” things.

It felt like I was just a brain teetering at the top of a hill. And on all sides, there are different slopes that lead us down all-consuming feedback loops. Down one side is dopamine and cheap addiction. But down the other, purportedly "better" side is still just exercise and endorphins or work and work-induced dopamine. And for the first time, it all felt, in a way, like everything was addiction. There were all these different hormones tugging at my brain. Some flavors just happened to be more culturally sanctioned.

But when did I lose the capacity to just sit at the top of the hill?

I used to play a lot of video games, and one of my favorites was a game called Skyrim. And I remember my first five minutes of the game distinctly — it was so graphically innovative compared to any other game out there, that all I wanted to do was walk around. So I walked around for hours, ignoring all quests and NPCs beseeching me. And I just looked at things. I climbed up a mountain. I climbed down the mountain. It was probably hours until I did my first quest. I talked to some NPCs, listened to what they had to say, and continued on my way.

Many games are like this — they're so visually stunning that you’re left with a deep sense of awe when you first start playing. But then, of course, the dopamine drip turns on, and you rush from quest to quest, skipping cutscenes, chasing the end, though you know that there's nothing at the end but no more game.

Isn't this what we do in life? We optimize for chasing goals. And then, at the end of it, there's of course nothing, really. Just a bunch of steadily decaying hormones and a dwindling sense of accomplishment.

The trite aphorism, of course, is obvious: "it's the journey, not the reward". But fundamentally, we are constructed to chase the reward, so to internalize this is not so trivial as to have knowledge of it — we need to recognize that our default mode is to chase the reward, in all things. We move from one thing to the next unthinkingly, because we are programmed to seek out the next hit. Even having practiced mindfulness for some time now, I'll find that, at best, I punctuate this endless chain of tasks with moments of clarity, only to proceed to bury my nose in the next thing as soon as it appears.

And this is the great irony of being human. On the one hand, everything wonderful comes from the journey, because the only meaning that can possibly exist comes from the fact of our consciousness. It’s impossible to find meaning in one’s life without being there to live it. Yet we are programmed to chase the reward instead, making it quite difficult to focus on the journey without some serious introspection.

So I tried just sitting. Being mindful, sure, but not in the way I usually do my practice. Where I typically set some clear intent, this time, I just noticed how amazing it is that I can even exist, Skyrim-style.

I managed to sit for like 5 minutes. But in that time, I just stewed in the idea that I didn't really have to do anything at all. And it was really nice. I think I'll do it again. Maybe you should try it too.