Much To-Do About Nothing
Of Nothings in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars.
A man had given me a definition so that I could love him better, that I have since used to love everything better. He chided me years ago that I was not following proper etiquette on our anniversary. I had imagined that it was a gendered holiday, like Valentine’s Day or my birthday, in which I am the object of attention and get nice things. I was told that perhaps this is not the correct assumption for anniversaries.
He told me that it is nice that I dressed up for dinner, and that I told him I loved him, and took photos with him, but it would be really meaningful if I also made something or scheduled an activity to show that I was a more active participant in the celebration.
I was confused – wasn’t I already participating in the anniversary? He told me that this was more than enough, and I don’t need to do anything big, but that it would mean a lot if I did anything. There is a dimension in which there is a large difference to him between me doing something and me doing nothing, and that difference is that doing anything is the difference between doing literally nothing and doing literally something. He didn’t want to be emotionally abandoned in the my girlfriend did literally nothing for our anniversary category. This made sense to me and stuck with me for many years.
I considered it a compelling argument, that doing literally anything is often, both technically and conceptually in the spirit of the context, the difference between doing literally nothing and literally something.
A few examples: bringing a gift to a dinner party (they might not open it then and there but would appreciate it), drinking water (a little is better than none), wearing socks (it doesn’t matter if they don’t match, they protect your feet).
I have found this sufficiently life-changing and useful as a frame to keep in mind, by itself, that I kept thinking about “nothing” after that, and what more can be said about it. I discovered that quite a lot of things can be said! The mathematicians have known this for a very long time; they have their many zeroes.
Mathematicians know that “nothing” is a collection of distinct ideas — each with its own symbol and properties. There is zero, the number that serves as the additive identity in algebra and arithmetic. If you add zero to any number, nothing changes. If nothing has changed, you know that you have added zero. Then there is the empty set, written as ∅, or {}, which represents a set with no elements. The cardinality of the empty set is zero, and it is defined to be a subset of every other set. In logic, a proposition that is always false is represented by 0, O, or ⊥, and is a foundation for truth tables.
So there is already something about nothing. What should we do about it?
We should do nothing!
Just kidding. I propose that you can do quite a lot with self-growth if you continue to interact with and refine these ideas revolving something versus nothing, and that a lot of really tricky limitations that may seem like they can only be surpassed with dramatic interventions can actually be gently explored. I will start by explaining why doing nothing is a funny phrase, and then talk about how doing something in a “just do it” or a “just do something” sense can actually be pretty nonsensical, and what you can do instead.
Always Late
I caught myself recently being on time to something that I should have been late for. I was walking home with lunch and was passing by the CVS. I wanted to buy a binder, and thought I would just step in and get it, to save time walking to the CVS later. I made my calculation and decided I would have enough time–
Or did I? I paused, and thought that I did not know what kind of binder I wanted. My plan was to go in, pay some money, and walk out with some binders, but I actually did not know what kind they had. I noticed that the steps involved with this expedition were not to walk in and walk out with a binder. There was a middle step which was to analyze the different binders, see if any of them inspired joy in me, check their prices, look at colors, and then finally check out. All of these steps could take anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes, depending on how many options there are. This is an unknown, and it is an unknown I would have to add to my timeline if I am trying to figure out if I can still make it to my meeting on time. I decided to skip CVS and go later because of this unknown.
There were a few steps I took in this situation that I noticed myself taking, that I do not always take; pausing and taking inventory of what the CVS excursion would entail, sizing up each step of the excursion, noticing if any of the steps had any unknowns, compare the size of the steps (including the unknowns) with the time I had before my meeting.
Often, when I do not take each of these steps, it is not that I am simply skipping all of them. Something else is going on. Sometimes, I have done the “sizing up of the task” enough times that I do not think enough has changed for me to need to do it again. Sometimes, I have an implicit model in my mind of tasks that can be done quicker or slower, such that if I lose time somewhere, I can gain it back somewhere else. Sometimes I know that there is some flexibility around being late.
There are good reasons to not always use the breakdown I used in the CVS example, but also some cool habits that are showcased there.
I have a theory that one thing that differentiates people who are chronically late to things and people who are consistently on time is a habit of pausing and sizing up unknowns in this way. Just one more phone call, just one more email, just one more coffee can make a person just a bit late – every time. A person who is familiar with their environment and their habits may get quite good at sizing up their tasks, and actually know how long it takes to put on their exact shoes, brew their exact cup of coffee, and send an email to their exact boss — hence being basically completely on time most of the time, just barely. But this skill may not transfer as well when they are in a different environment. The knowns actually do become unknowns, and the person actually is having trouble sizing them up properly. Furthermore, the person may be inclined to optimism, and use an optimistic time for the unknown task rather than than a more realistic or pessimistic time that it would take.
If you want to be more on time to things, there are a few different skills you can practice. You can practice guessing how long you have to get somewhere, and checking if that ends up right or not. You can practice noticing “invisible nothings” – the parts of sequences (like in my trip to CVS) that you might not consider “something” in the sequence, but actually it is something that takes up time.
You can also practice “optimistic futures” – things you skip now may allow you to have little bits of stolen time later. For example, when I skipped going to CVS, I “gained” getting to chat with the woodworker I saw on my way to my destination. It is not the case that time you do not “spend now” you cannot spend later.
If you count both the browsing the binders, and the saying hi to the woodworker, as “nothing” you both are not accounting properly for how to get to places on time (logical, competency, image, performance goals) and you also are not accounting properly that talking to the woodworker was really nice (social, fun, mystery, spontaneity, emotional, heart goals).
Of Nothings in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars*
I have introduced above both the concept of “sizing up” the nothings and counting the nothings. Let’s explore this further.
What kinds of nothings are actually somethings?
Let’s come up with a parade of nothings and decorate them. We can give them beautiful scarves, hats, banners and batons.
Let’s take digestion for example. How many times has a friend called you and asked what you were up to, and you said “I’m just hanging out, merely digesting.” (Note too that if you are having an issue with the digestion, it would quickly not feel so mere!) You might have noticed after you eat certain foods, you feel different immediately after, different again in the hour after, and then different again later.
For coffee and alcohol, you probably know the ways that these affect you personally, or water.
Then there are more esoteric ones. Spicy foods. For me, any kind of shellfish or small variable fishes, like a spread of sushi, usually leaves me euphoric in a distinct way, as if I’d absorbed the souls of many little fishes whole and now they’re inside me, doing something fascinating. Chocolate is a common food that can change mood in an intense way, depending on the kind, and has had studied effects over cultures and eras as people try to perfect the effects.
And then there are teas—healing teas, herbal teas—which sound like they couldn’t have that big an effect, as if their little packages are false advertising for marketing purposes. Like apples: honeycrisp, everspring, granny smith. I’m sure there are many genetically different types of apples, but since when are there so many? Maybe it’s more of a business than deep advancements in genetic methods for creating ever more new apples.
However, I suspect the herbal teas are not a business strategy — a lot of them do indeed work for many people and have different effects. Chamomile and mint put me right to sleep; dandelion and catnip tea make my face completely red.
They say it takes approximately 200 calories to digest protein. This is not nothing – this is more calories than it takes to digest every other macro, and this is part of why it is recommended to people hoping to lose weight to eat protein; it burns calories, grows your muscles, keeps you full, and you can only eat so much of it. Some people get many reactions to food, so they organize their life around not having negative effects, only positive ones.
Eating food clearly is not nothing!
Sleep, too, is not really nothing. You think you’re gone, but there’s activity: dreams, memory consolidation, things rearranging themselves for when you return. The hour in bed after waking, or the dreamy drift before sleep, is full of mental sorting,
What else can we think of?
Maybe there are things that you may be afraid to admit is either nothing or something – things that are uncomfortable to name because putting them in either category has strategic consequences. Sometimes making “doing nothing” be like doing something can be very helpful, and then the opposite is true as well; making “doing something” be like doing nothing can be helpful or strategic.
Things that can fit into either category depending on the strategic intent of the person can include: feeding your dog, going on a walk, doing your writing, calling a friend. Each of these can be a genuinely important activity, an excuse disguised as an important task, something you do without thinking in between other “important tasks,” or a lifesaving intervention to save another creature, depending on the situation. Then, regardless of what the actual situation was, somebody else can tell you and tell others that it was actually one of the other categories of type!
You can also spend some time thinking about the moments when you are planning to do something, getting ready to do something, starting to do something, getting out of doing something, or relaxing.
In high school, I got obsessed with transitions because I was doing too many things, and I couldn’t just not do them. I wanted to do everything that my school offered. I became really obsessed with training a certain way, with moving my energy in ways such that I could do well at all of my activities. Removing unnecessary or wasteful transitions in a day became necessary.
Much of daily existence is built from these “nothings” — transitions, intervals, pauses, recoveries — that are in fact the tissue connecting everything else.
And some of these “nothings” are really quite massive.
The title of this section is based on Chapter 57 of Moby Dick, titled Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars.
Counting Nothings – 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 = 14?
Above, I have given a few examples that center on natural processes of the body. You can expand this to natural processes outside of your body. When you pass a plant, what is the plant doing? When you pass an animal, what is the animal doing? You can use this exercise to train your attention. When you pass a sourdough, or a mead, what is happening there? What goes on in honeycombs?
You can get much more specific than “sometimes doing nothing is helpful.”
How specific? What have I discovered?
A lot of “doing nothing” isn’t actually neutral, and a lot of “doing something” actually isn’t always more productive. Some things that you may count as “doing nothing” somebody else may consider quite harmful, or quite violent! A fancy job at a hedge fund that you consider “doing something” somebody else may consider wildly useless!
Given the importance of perspective in what I had just set up, how can this differentiator between something and nothing be helpful? We have just gone from natural processes and the constant movement of life, to subjective takes on what is productive for society. I do believe that different groups have reasons to obfuscate, and are doing so for their reasons. “Just laying here, naturally, beautifully” as a party theme is not great for Big Makeup!
And so how do we make a bridge between the natural and the social?
You can think of a simple exercise. What would you like to do more of, and less of, and what are you doing nothing at all of (that you may consider the empty set) that you would like to instantiate?
How you break these down can be interesting. For example, the problem can be not that you’re doing nothing, but that in the “doing nothing” you are actually doing something you’d rather be doing less of. Perhaps this is looking at your phone, or playing a specific video game. Meanwhile, there is something in doing something you may actually find rejuvenating, resetting, rebalancing—putting things back into original order – but because it is so rejuvenating it would feel like “doing nothing.” Anything that causes you stress, therefore, I may model as “doing something.” Resetting is actually a kind of “doing nothing” that you may want to be doing, and so I may reconfigure it as “doing something” as well.
I do believe that if we had clearer names for these different states it would be better to optimize them at the level of granularity people want. When we live with lots of other people, everyone can see what you’re up to and ask what you’re doing. They see you eating, relaxing, hanging out, cooking, or talking to someone; they don’t interface with you as if you are “doing nothing” when you are hanging out blankly staring at your phone. Inside of yourself you may feel like you are doing nothing, but for other people, it is not actually neutral in their eyes. There are even different ways of looking at your phone!
The Theory of Change
I have this schema of habit formation and change. It’s not really a new system of habit change; rather, it is about choosing habits.
I always thought there were good habits and bad habits — not quite, but quite a bit. If you replace every bad habit with a good habit, you’d have on net more good habits and fewer bad habits. This sounds good to me.
I got this idea from a few different sources over many years: the Aristotelian Nicomachean Ethics, Pride and Prejudice, and Dorian Gray. The ideas are that it’s easy enough to do something that’s good for you just as it is to do something bad for you. Both involve some amount of pleasure, pain, and strain. With posture, just as it can be painful and pleasant to sit with bad posture, it can be the same with good posture. So, given this, you might as well learn to sit with good posture — when you notice you’re sitting with bad posture, change to the good version. You’ll be a little uncomfortable either way; you might as well choose the version that, over time, leads to good outcomes.
Over time, this leaves you beautiful when you are older. Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice writes that the point of manners is not just for social niceties or signaling, but to look good when you are older. When you’re younger, bad manners aren’t so noticeable, but when you’re older, bad habits really add up, and you become kind of insufferable.
So these refinements became the baseline of my thinking about habits. I read Atomic Habits and really liked it. I think it’s a book that basically everybody would benefit from reading at least once, even if the reading includes letting the audiobook wash over them in a car—even if they don’t join a program of self-improvement based on it and don’t think much about it again.
I think this is a terrific text, but it is not the only resource about habits.
A person who focuses more exclusively on habits of mind is Nathaniel Branden. He is famous for his book, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem. He talks about little questions you can ask yourself every day, and his flagship program revolves around simply asking yourself the basic questions every day. Some of these include: what would life be like if I was 5% more aware of my surroundings? What would my life be like if I was 5% more attentive to my environment? What would it be like if I was 5% more empowered? The idea is that over 60 days, asking these questions creates a subtle transformation, but it adds up to a big shift in how you perceive yourself, how you perceive others, and how you perceive your own capacities. (There’s a wonderful version of the author reading the book aloud, and it’s only 2 hours.)
So there is this rich tradition of thinking about habits, which I have been considering for a long time and using frequently.
Of course I cannot leave out, in this inventory of traditions, Carolyn of Existential Kink. She makes the suggestion in her book, Existential Kink, and a set of practices that sometimes we want to have our bad habits because they are allowing us something — they’re useful to us, somehow. Sometimes to get a new habit, you have to fully embrace and allow yourself to complete the arc that the bad habit was doing for you.
If it’s eating cookies every night, this might mean getting yourself more cookies that you can eat and really lavishly indulge for a week, completely shamelessly, so that you feel the full feeling about having all those cookies. You would not constantly be seeking—you’re more bored of it, you can move on to something else (or decide you like it so much you embrace it as part of your life, you commit to it shamelessly, and then you can more confidently change something else). Maybe you now want to walk more, or more fully—like to be in better shape so you can walk to the store, or maybe you want to make more money to have a higher “cookie arc.”
So we have this rich inventory of habit formation literature and practices. This is simply the list from my head that seems to be important for how we operate order.
Of course, there is also Indian dharma which influences me, though I haven’t included it here because I wouldn’t trust myself to explain it well.
Of course, there are conventional norms of prettiness and good behavior, culturally inherited: yoga is good, jogging is good, being skinny is good, making more money is good, keeping plants alive is good, brushing your teeth is generally seen as good.
There does arise a question around “being bad” because you have had habits, if being good means having good habits. There can be trickiness around when bad habits reinforce each other or reinforce something you have to do. Existential Kink may not be enough to release you in such a situation, because you might need a habit because it is making some other part of your life work. If you need to be high performing at your job, then eating takeout every day, staying up late, waking up early, drinking a ton of coffee—these are all necessary habits to do your job at the level you need. But you might not even like coffee, or staying up late; you have these habits not because you like each individual habit, but because you see the entire catalog of habits as essential to completing your priorities for the time being.
I have come up with a habit change system that is simple enough to explain, but tricky to do. People tend not to do it because of the balance I’ve described, and so it’s actually pretty hard. Sometimes you want things to be different, know you want them different, but are otherwise stuck. My system takes as a starting point that you might have a funny balance you are carefully maintaining.
The system is like so: you take an inventory of things you want to do more, things you want to do less, and things you are not doing at all that you may want to do any amount of.
(Diagram of the circles)
It’s better to do this exercise with less pressure and a state of play. You are already in some sort of balance that is doing something for you. You don’t have to change, but maybe you want to for some reason. Either you’ll find things you want to change, or you’ll notice you don’t actually want to change anything—both are win conditions with this method.
You find things you want to do less, more, or want to add.
For example, maybe you want to read more, walk more. It’s important these be activities that you do. “Eat less carbs” isn’t as good for this as “track my calories” or “stop eating my seventeen midnight croissants.” This keeps “what you are doing” at the level of focus.
What I like about this is that accountability around “doing” all day can make you feel a lot of shame if taken all at once, so a smaller, piecemeal approach about what you do all day displaces judgment. “I spent three hours texting my friend about where to meet, sort of watching TV and sort of working, then met up, had a good time, got drunk, got confused on the subway home, drank water, but was hungover anyway, then I went to work and was drowsy all day, then went home and did only a half-hearted workout.” There is a lot of judgment. The truth is, even productive people by society’s standards often have funny days and schedules, a total mix of past success, working hard, and some amount of riding the arc and doing some disciplined work and willpower. The exact organization of this can be confusing, and there’s a lot of room to just do what you actually want. So finding an intervention method that lets you take an inventory without the trap of self-denial or saving face with yourself is valuable. Lots of people manage relationships, look for intimacy, love, compromise, meet basic needs, do “garbage collection” for their psyche, sleep, wake up, are confused, orient to the world—any number of these things can be lived. If something isn’t working, you throw it out! It needs to be changed immediately—what I like about this approach is that it takes...
And then, changing habits in such an environment can be really hard. You may really want something different—walk more, eat healthier, drink more water, spend more time with loved ones, learn more skills, read more, go to therapy—but your habits are reinforcing other habits which reinforce either your chosen or circumstantial priorities, and you can’t actually change your habits without destabilizing the entire system. It can really be challenging.
I’ve felt this sort of struggle in my own life. Perhaps my wildest attempt at habit change has been trying to wake up earlier. It’s been very difficult. I tried all kinds of things: setting alarms, using travel and jet lag to reset a habit, bringing it back, removing electronics from myself, having something nice to do in the morning—like a solitary walk with the sunrise. None of this worked.
I tried to consider myself a “morning person” and tried to have my identity be different, wake up earlier, notice scents and smells, different plants and animals outside at dawn. But the dawn was not more about certain things I could only get in the mornings; none of that really worked.
Why it didn’t work took me a while to explain. The system was in balance, and it kept wanting me to wake between 10 and noon each day, no matter what else was happening in my life. Why not get a job that requires early rising if that’s important? Perhaps, but last time I did, I pissed off my boss coming in at 11 every day and staying late, so perhaps that would be a forcing function, but it would unbalance me and make me uncomfortable, because something about the balance seems to be the key.
In five thousand years, will anyone care? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Definitely not in five million, or five billion years. I’ve often wondered the point of all this.
But this typewriter is fascinating! I am being more deliberate in my typing. Good thing I learned to type before auto-correct—I developed good habits. It’s a tragedy that today’s young people can’t type. Did you know that in Chinese, people don’t even need to type the whole word in pinyin anymore? Just type the first letter of each word, and the computer auto-types the full sentence or phrase! This has become so widespread that many people can’t remember how to handwrite anymore. Tragic. I’m one of those weirdos who actually likes handwriting.
I keep a notebook with me and everything. They’re 35¢ at Walmart during back-to-school season. They used to be 17¢ back in 2019, but eh, inflation—what can you do?
One thing I really like about the work of Robert Kegan is his premise that adults do not merely just stop developing. It’s very common to think about children as growing up, children as developing, and we have a lot of social programming to endorse children’s development (Boy Scouts, school, college, youth groups, religious rites of passage).
But it’s not as if humans become fundamentally different once they reach a certain age. Now suddenly, they stop growing.
But they do have more “empty” in some ways. If an adult is in an empty room, the adult has memories to ruminate on. If given an empty afternoon to do whatever they want, instead of pondering possibilities, they’ll go through their backlog of responsibilities and handle bills, emails, and otherwise fill the time with things they didn’t have time for.
So the “do something instead of nothing” makes sense for people in school. Many people do not have an updated theory of change for adulthood, and the meme of “I’m bad if I’m doing nothing,” “I’m good if I’m doing something” is the programming that a lot of people end up having by default.
In some ways this leads to cool stuff. Somebody who plays a lot of video games might decide this is “doing nothing,” and then start a Twitch channel or YouTube channel about the games. However, I think the “bottling up of creative pursuits or artistic pursuits and making them visible and legible to others” is actually a different thing from what I’m talking about.
What are other examples of things that seem like nothing but are actually something—
There’s the quality of your sleep, and what is put into your cache to process during sleep.
Having conversations, and not having conversations—having a conversation could be good, could be bad, could be interesting, could make you take a certain posture or do certain work.
Have you noticed that even if you’re in a pleasant conversation with a stranger, there’s a natural time when you both notice being tired of the conversation, say something pleasant, and move on? It’s not because you’ve “run out of things to talk about.” Often there are things both would want to follow up on in a next conversation, soon. It’s more about conversations of this sort not being natural! There are kinds of hanging out and talking that are more like “doing nothing” (though I’d clarify the list later).
That’s because both people are maintaining the container of the conversation, making sure the other isn’t too uncomfortable (even if there’s soul-searching). We won’t have time to do all of it; it’ll be packaged up. And if you’re doing soul-searching, I doubt anybody would call it “doing nothing,” even by their standards.
A positive, deep connection is not “doing nothing!”
Why do I care about this? Because so much of self-improvement is about doing more, and less of nothing. And I think this is not nearly as precise, and leads to people getting stuck in funny ways.
It often ends up not working. Because the “doing nothings” people try to fill with self-improvement methods end up being replaced with something else, which is a completely different outcome.
Children have more “nothings,” and perhaps this started with children. You do not want to leave children alone in empty rooms—without enough stimulation. I was lucky to grow up in a house with books and toys. My parents didn’t read the books, but they were classics (Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn), and I was told I should read them if I wanted to be smart. So I got motivated to think about them and work up to reading. A child or person in an empty room is quite sad and not good for development. There is a difference between looking at a single object (drawing, writing, reflecting about relationships between objects) but it’s very different from just being in an actual empty room.
Assume you are already in balance, and that any changes are actually optional. (If there really was a forcing function that made it urgent and imperative to change, you would almost certainly change because of its strength. In those cases, you may actually want a technique to resist some part of the change if it’s not fully aligned with your interests or benevolence.)
If you’re already in balance and your life is already working (maybe you’re losing money, but you’re okay with that; maybe you’re losing energy, or would lose more energy than money; maybe you’re overweight but want extra calories now), your life doesn’t have to be net positive or net neutral for us to consider it “balanced” for this exercise.
This exercise is mostly to help break holding patterns—some kind of homeostasis that’s tricky to change. That means your thing is working well enough that change isn’t obvious or easy.
Then you think of something. Maybe you do not spend any time reading and want to spend any time reading. That is, you want reading to be a category you actually do, rather than it being an empty set.
Perhaps you practice guitar some of the time, but want to practice a lot more.
So what’s the intervention I propose at this step? That’s a good question.
What’s the actual method I’m describing? Good question.
Is the answer “just do it?” Just move whatever has to be moved to make it work? Erm.