The Quiet Rebellion of Doing Nothing
The Lost Art of Being Bored - and Why We Need This More Than Ever
When I first moved to Denmark, I learned that “doing nothing” was not a moral failure but a national pastime. On Sundays, my corner of rural Jutland seemed to stop. Shops closed, buses thinned, and people stayed home, drinking coffee and staring out of windows. At first, I found it alarming. Then? Quietly wonderful. Over the years it changed – shops opened seven days a week. People got busy. Life carried on. But I still remembered the peaceful times with fondness.
Now, back in Britain, the default setting is “booked”. Calendars groan from the Great Scheduling Frenzy: rehearsals, school events, Christmas jumper days, “mulled wine and networking” evenings that no one enjoys. The season of peace on Earth now comes with a shared spreadsheet and I have friends whose children seem to have double clarinet, advanced physics and Gold Duke of Edinburgh all before breakfast.
I can’t keep up. So I won’t.
The Christmas-Time Subversion
This is particularly potent in the run-up to Christmas. When diaries are stuffed, when FOMO glowers, when there’s a myth of the perfect childhood and the perfect Christmas to live up to. It feels subversive to do nothing. To carve out an evening or a Saturday afternoon where no activity is pencilled in and no one has to be anywhere at 9am sharp. Just… nothing scheduled.
READ: Falling off the FOMO Wagon - on belonging and trying
The idea of doing nothing has been a siren call for a while now. A father of five (FIVE!) told me recently: ‘when care-ees outnumber carers, a degree of benign neglect is inevitable. Because what’s the alternative? Apparently, you can’t put one of them back (or two, or three…)’.
In our household, the life-maths is simple but brutal: three children can never have the same amount of attention as two.
Friends with two children swiftly find that two smalls in the house can never have the same parental spotlight as one did.
And carers of one can never allow themselves quite the same self-development time, career development or social butterfly-level diary management as was possible before caring responsibilities.
All of us have something. For me, short of outsourcing every piece of homework, every social engagement, every extracurricular activity and bedtime story to someone else (or boarding school) the uber-schedule just isn’t possible. So the best decision becomes: stop.
Stop straining and struggling for the impossible. Accept the reality. And in that acceptance, find freedom.
This Isn’t Failure - It’s Creation
Doing nothing is not failure. It’s creation. Of space. Of time. Of imagination. So I don’t organise that extra activity. So I don’t sign everyone up to the Christmas-craft workshop. So instead, we sit. We watch the light fade. I let children bounce about without agenda. They get bored. There is some moaning. And then? We all – slowly - rediscover what it is we love to do – or not do – given time and space.
The Philosophy of Nothing
Philosophers have long taken boredom seriously. Blaise Pascal argued that humanity’s miseries stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Arthur Schopenhauer linked boredom to a lack of inner richness and Walter Benjamin (bear with me – this was a tough term during an English Lit undergrad so I’ll be damned if I’m wasting the one opportunity I have to reference him in the past 25 years…) saw boredom as a potential “dream bird that hatches the egg of experience,” suggesting it can inspire creativity if one’s “high creativity” remains alive.
Modern psychology is belatedly catching up with what our ancestors and the philosophers already knew: that it’s good for us to stare into the middle distance once in a while.
Doing nothing is neither laziness nor surrender. Some of our best ideas arrive not when we’re maximising time, but when we’ve run out of things to do.
The Lost Art of Sitting Still
My husband’s beloved late grandmother (shout out Granny Marjory) used to sit on a park bench for an hour and watch the world go by. She didn’t bring a Kindle or a smartphone (neither existed); she just looked. Sometimes people thought her odd. Today, she’d be trending as #MindfulnessInspo - a living Pinterest board for peace.
Those of us raised before the Internet probably grew up with the luxury of boredom – with the privilege of being bored. Train platforms, waiting rooms, moments between songs on a cassette were all opportunities for mind wandering. Now those interludes have been colonised by screens and productivity culture. “Idle hands” are to be avoided, even in childhood. The modern parent’s calendar is a battleground of enrichment: drama, piano, “fun workshops”, mindfulness for primary school children.
READ: Your Wallet, Your Happiness - 2025 World Happiness Report Unpacked
Danes, famously have the concept of hygge - that warm, cosy, ease of being - but they also have kedsomhed, boredom, and they don’t traditionally rush to fix it in quite the same way as we do in much of the world. For older generations, boredom was seen as an essential condition for imagination. It’s when you’ve run out of things to do that you start to think. Or play. Or just…be.
In Defence of the Blank Space
Doing nothing isn’t the same as apathy. It’s the creation of space in which something - anything - might emerge. Writers, composers, mathematicians have long depended on that space. Tchaikovsky swore by his daily walk of purposelessness; Virginia Woolf called idleness “the most necessary of occupations”.
Maybe it’s time to rebrand boredom, to return to the simple art of not doing. To accept that an empty afternoon is not a void to be filled, but a landscape to be explored.
Mindfulness, after all, has had a spectacular PR makeover: ancient monastic practice reborn as corporate productivity hack. We download an app to be told to breathe. Boredom: this is your moment. It’s free. It’s there. It’s much needed.
In a world that treats every minute as a commodity, to do nothing is an act of rebellion.
So as the festive season accelerates, resist the urge to keep up. Let others chase gold awards and clarinet exams before dawn. You can sit this one out - literally.
Do nothing. Think nothing. Watch the light change.
Until next week, vi ses,
Helen
What I've learned from Danes: 5 Lessons for a Better Festive Season
After 12 years of Danish winters—each marked by hygge, hearty meals, and some questionable crafting decisions—I’m gearing up for my first Christmas back in the UK.
Wonderful! Thank you very much for the reminder that doing nothing is so very worthwhile. Excuse me, I need to go now and look out the window at the clouds.
Love this. New(ish) motherhood and being nap-trapped has been the ultimate invitation to get comfortable with staring into the middle distance and just enjoying the moment. Hard adjustment, but so needed after what 35 years of American hustle culture does to the nervous system.