I’ve spent a good amount of time in the last few years doing “nothing.”

By doing “nothing,” I mean contributing nothing to the gross national product, creating no goods to sell, rendering no services for hire, and being singularly unproductive to the society at large.

On one hand, this has caused me to feel some guilt. Nobody likes to think of himself as lazy and useless.

On the other hand, I consider all of my past experiences when being “useful” and “productive” was at odds with my natural impulse to stop, to rest, to play, to be creative, to experience life on my own terms.

It started in school.

Thom Hartmann, in his article on the history of compulsory schooling in the United States, concludes:

And so today we have a public school system which has as its primary goal the socialization of our children. A willingness to comply, to go along, to submit to the authority of the system and the teacher is more important than intelligence or curiosity or creativity. Those kids who go along are rewarded with good grades. Those who don’t naturally submit their will to the authority figures, the teachers, are often crushed.

And you know what? I can tell. It’s had that crushing effect on me. The primary goal is to condition me to be “productive,” not that lofty ideal of helping me to love learning.

Nowadays we all take it for granted that, for at least twelve years of our lives, we’ll spend seven hours a day, five days a week, sitting still at desks doing what we are ordered to do, except for those precious few moments when we are allowed to care for our physical needs to eat or pee or our emotional needs to play and be spontaneous — all at rigidly scheduled intervals, of course.

My own experience was no different from that of most people except that I happened to excel in school a bit more. In fact, this is rather telling: I was one of the top students at my high school, and went on to Stanford University, a college with a top-flight reputation; and yet despite my “success” I still feel traumatized by the compulsory nature of my education, and know others from Stanford who feel the same way.

After leaving school, of course, many of us go on to take jobs where — surprise — we sit in cubicles or offices for eight hours a day, five days a week, doing what we were trained to do as children. Being “productive.”

Productivity, in this sense, then, is an external measure. It’s an indication of how much we have conformed, how much we contribute to a system defined by someone else. In contrast, one can be prolifically creative and productive in a way that is self-defined — say, learning to play a musical instrument — but that can be labelled “unproductive” simply because it doesn’t meet someone else’s definition of productivity.

Now, granted, there is a certain level of activity necessary for basic sustenance and survival. But how much do any of us really examine what is necessary in life, and what is excess? How much is it necessary to do?

Anthropological studies in different parts of the world have indicated that nomadic hunter-gatherer type societies typically worked only two or three hours per day for their subsistence. Like the deer and other creatures of the wild, hunter-gatherer peoples have nothing more to do than to wander and eat.

Why is it that the more “advanced” we’ve gotten, the harder we’ve had to work just to stay alive? And at the same time, many of us don’t know how to make our own clothes, grow our own food, and take care of our own health — in short, to look after our own needs.

This is the difference between work and Work.

In my ideal world, work is simply energy invested into an activity, whether physical or mental, simultaneously to achieve ends and to enjoy the process of working. Hunter-gatherer tribes worked, yes, but in the sense that to live is to work, and to work is to live — acknowledging work as the natural creative manifestation of our inner needs and desires. I’m hungry, so I take steps to ensure that I eat. I’m cold, so I take steps to ensure that I’m warm. I’m bored, so I take steps to ensure that I’m engaged and interested in something.

However, trauma arises when we divorce ourselves from the richness of the living experience, of which work is a natural and intrinsic part. Thus we deify work, turning it into Work, an institution that rules our lives, even all the way down into the tender early years of school. No longer is work a tool, a means towards an end; instead we are the tools, working toward ends that we cannot fathom. In the beginning it seems to benefit us — after all, we have more things now than we ever could have had without the institution of Work — but now our technology and our reliance on oil, to name a few, are ruling us.

Work is one of those malignant belief systems that brushes aside each person’s sense of intrinsic value, replacing it with a conditional value that is dependent upon a certain set of criteria being met — in school, it’s grades; at work, it’s sales. Inevitably, some people will meet those criteria, and some others won’t.

I’ve found the Work ethic to be hugely disempowering. It has become, for me, an internalized entity, a harsh taskmaster telling me to strive for some arbitrary external standard of excellence rather than the internal measure of what is good and right for me, which in some situations is work and in some situations is rest and play. It removes the significance from my internal state of being. It turns me into a workaholic.

Really, I’d like to be the opposite. I’d like to be able to appreciate the work that I do, because I choose to do it and I enjoy it and it intrigues me. I admire those who do that. And in a grand sense I think that’s where life is most keenly experienced, in the creative edge, where my life is an education, and it is self-directed, and the exploration of this mysterious world is up to nobody but myself.

Real life isn’t multiple choice. Real life isn’t assembly-line. Real life is trial and error, thrust and parry, wandering the world.

As Seth says, “The only true work is found in play.”

I’ll leave you with this anecdote from Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, a story of a time in his life when he was getting really burned out with physics:

… Then I had a thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing — it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines the curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference: I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.

So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.

Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate into the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling.

I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate …

It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.

Addendum, 7/11/2005:

Just found a nicely relevant quote from American Buddhist monk Ajahn Amaro:

I’ve had people say to me, “What do you do for a living? What do you contribute to the Gross National Product?”

I respond by asking them what makes a nation healthy? Does it depend on how many sacks of wheat it exports or how many tons of steel it sells? Or does the health of a nation include the well-being of individuals, and furthermore, is that well-being only dependent on their physical health and comfort, or does it also involve their peace of mind? I try to expand the definition of national well-being.