In modernity, whenever we speak of pleasure, we speak of the pleasures of doing things, especially things requiring a lot of money.
But what about the pleasures of doing nothing?
It feels good to do nothing sometimes… absolutely nothing, or kick back and just listen to music, watch youtube, lie on your bed.
Why feel guilt or shame about it?
Our society tells us not to feel shame or guilt about all sorts of things we used to feel guilty about, like sex or drugs… at least pharmaceutical drugs, because we’re, ‘sick’, right?
*Laughs, that’s what some alcoholics and pot smokers say, I drink and smoke for my social anxiety, for my depression…
People don’t feel so guilty about having abortions anymore… it’s not like we have a people deficiency, right?
Well what about doing nothing… spending the entire day being unproductive?
It’s not as if we have a productivity deficiency, there’s bloody products and waste everywhere, millions of landfills of them.
It’s good for the environment, the less stuff we’re doing and exchanging, the less resources we have to extract from the earth.
It’s good for your health, in moderation, researchers keep telling us we’re too stressed.
We’re told like life has to have some big purpose, we used to find that in religion, or family, now we try to find all that in the everyday, in ourselves, and a lot of time, it just isn’t there, but we run about all day looking for it, or libraries, reading self help books.
We’re supposed to like find it in our careers, or whatever, what we consume.
But you can live without it, it’s enough just to exist.
You can keep busy doing little things, having little hobbies, little interests, you can get by with very little money, and not a lot of effort.
They tell us we’re like special, we have so much to contribute, but most of us don’t have a lot, we’re mediocre, and it’s okay.
I think there’s this sickness society has, collectively.
I heard humanity consumes more energy per capita than any other species times a thousand.
I mean look, we need so much energy to keep all our gadgets and gizmos running that we think we need.
And then we pile more and more things on top of them and then wonder why the planet is in such dire straights.
Maybe we all need to just start taking it a lot easier, or at least if some people want to, don’t make them feel so guilty about it.
If people want to live a laid back life, by all means, not everyone has to have your philosophy or lifestyle, people can live however they wish, and to some extent society recognizes that, they say if you want to spend your money traveling, or on tattoos/plastic surgery, or fast cars, it’s totally up to you, but what if you don’t want to make much money, or spend much?
It’s like a big sin, society does virtually everything but put a gun to your head if you tell em you want to live like that.
But thankfully people can still do whatever they want… or nothing if they want, in the main… or just think about stuff, idle thought, with little-no monetary incentive.