[HN Gopher] One of the most popular activities in non-industrial...
___________________________________________________________________
One of the most popular activities in non-industrial societies:
doing nothing
Author : mooreds
Score : 92 points
Date : 2022-04-11 15:34 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I live in the USA, and at least for me, the activity of doing
| nothing is alive and well. I can sit in our living room, outside,
| or under a tree on a trail behind our house for quite a while
| before I start to get bored.
|
| Sometimes I waste time on the web and sometimes doing nothing.
|
| re: the article: as someone else here said, I did wonder if some
| people in non-industrial societies are just resting.
| mooreds wrote:
| Paper mentioned in tweet thread:
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1906196116
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > Living in fast-paced, industrialized societies with constant
| access to entertainment, it's easy to lose sight of the value of
| doing nothing
|
| _what_ is the value? Why is this part of the conclusion?
|
| Also, why isn't "thinking" a category? Are the people doing
| nothing really doing nothing.
| jsiaajdsdaa wrote:
| Humans should be allowed to have leisure as they see fit. A
| life exists to be experienced as one wishes, not in pursuit of
| some abstract alleged collective goal of societal efficiency.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| I'm not sure how that relates to what I said - who said value
| means "to society"?
|
| It's this article trying to link the difference to
| industrialisation/capitalism lifestyle (versus high-labour
| and hot climate, for example).
| derevaunseraun wrote:
| Who do they think they are? Time is money, they might as well be
| lighting dollar bills on fire
| irrational wrote:
| Reminds me of a guy who put out a video saying that anyone that
| cooks or bakes is a loser since they could spend that time
| making money and just buy food from stores/restaurants.
| imtringued wrote:
| Yeah even the food industry agrees. Just throw some powders
| together and call it food.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Hmm, now I think about it. Can't say about baking, but with
| cooking is there some sub-section of food that might actually
| be more cost effective to cook yourself? Let's say good
| quality steak. The markups in restaurants are substantial and
| time commitment for cooking might not be too big...
| convolvatron wrote:
| or I might actually enjoy learning and doing things for
| myself - to such an extent that I actually might not count
| every penny involved
| gwern wrote:
| There's similar material on how much time is spent 'doing
| nothing' in https://mattlakeman.org/2021/07/27/shadow-of-the-sun/
| and _The Discovery of France_.
| gunfighthacksaw wrote:
| I forget the comedian but I found this observation funny:
|
| - a lone person leaning on a building having a smoke: no problem
|
| - wandering in circles in the park talking on the phone: no one
| gives a second thought
|
| - sitting on a bench by yourself doing nothing: who the hell is
| this psycho?!
| blamazon wrote:
| This is funny, but one of my favorite parts of New York City is
| how solo idle bench sitting is socially normalized. I've had
| many more nice serendipitous chats with other solo idle bench
| sitters in NYC than other American metro areas where I have
| idle solo bench sat.
|
| Perhaps it has to do with the implicit communal assumption that
| everyone in public is a potential psycho.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Doing stuff expends energy. Which means more time collecting and
| preparing food and water - you know, the second, third, fourth,
| fifth, and sixth most common tasks on that list.
| vilhelm_s wrote:
| Is this because doing nothing is "popular", or because non-
| industrial societies don't produce enough calories to do more?
| There's an interesting blogpost[0] about extreme poverty in 20th-
| century Africa:
|
| > He describes the narrow alleys of his neighborhood being packed
| with bayayes who just sit and stand around all day. Like, for the
| entire day. They have no jobs, no money, no goals, and they eat
| so little that they have no energy for leisure activities. The
| closest thing to an objective they have is keeping out of the
| sun, so they slowly move around the alleys to stay in the shade.
| Their highlight in a day might be some sort of public commotion,
| like a thief being caught, which will cause an enormous crowd to
| swell and watch the proceedings. [...]
|
| > Kapuscinski constantly describes much of Africa's baseline
| climate as so hot, humid/dry, bug-filled, and generally
| insufferable that even passive existence is too taxing to be
| productive. Ie. the people of Abdallah Wallo can't work hard
| because it is literally dangerous to do so.
|
| Doing nothing is the most common activity, but not exactly by
| choice.
|
| [0]https://mattlakeman.org/2021/07/27/shadow-of-the-sun/
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Thanks for the link - that's a very interesting read. Though,
| it looks like things have gotten a little more fun in Abdallah
| Wallo in the past 70 years!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1gNEG0OdNo
| didibus wrote:
| So we're all just somehow happy assuming that we don't equally
| spend most of our time doing nothing without data?
|
| I definitely spend a lot of time doing nothing, even though I
| might be pretending not.
|
| And then we have giant industry all about passive entertainment
| where we can turn our brain off, like all the crappy TV and
| movies and tiktoks, and YouTube, and watching other people play
| games or do sport where we just sit doing nothing half paying
| attention.
|
| If there "doing nothing" involved meditating, thinking, or what
| not, but as far as I'm concerned there "doing nothing" sounds
| like they're just watching the leafs blow in the wind, the bird
| sings, and that's just another version of watching TikTok that's
| slightly less entertaining.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I grew up in rural Vermont in the 90s. We lived on a dirt road.
| We were homeschooled, had spotty cell service at best, and when
| we did have a computer my parents limited it to 30 minutes of use
| at a time.
|
| I spent a lot of time doing nothing growing up. We had a big yard
| so I spent a lot of time outside. Mostly doing nothing. Sometimes
| having bonfires where we sat, talked, and did nothing. Somedays I
| read.
|
| But mostly I did a lot of nothing. I was bored sometimes but
| honestly I miss those days. I miss waking up and thinking that I
| had nothing to do and letting the day drag on and on.
| mc32 wrote:
| As societies we seek a balance between progress, status quo and
| regression.
|
| We want to progress to overcome nature (disease, harshness, etc.)
| but we should also have a measure of idleness and recreation
| without it letting us slide backwards.
| WhatIsDukkha wrote:
| Many of us spend large parts of the day pulling in new
| information in various ways.
|
| How useful is the information if you don't take the time to roll
| it around in your head and see where it fits?
| n-i-g-g-e-r wrote:
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I've spend most of my day today napping and watching youtube and
| a bit of doom scrolling.
|
| With less technology, that would be categorized as mostly
| nothing.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I feel that what technology has changed is that we have
| something to do that is in actuality nothing. Watching Youtube,
| browsing news or reading HN and posting some comments really
| are for me doing nothing... Not that you couldn't do something
| in there, but I think many of the ways we spend time is doing
| nothing.
|
| We just have something to do while we do nothing. Back in time
| we did not.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Functionally it feels very different. Doing something that
| doesnt feel like much of anything is still different from
| doing nothing. You could argue that the tweets linked
| included tidying up and making tools as doing nothing but
| those seemed more like something you could do while lounging
| around.
|
| Interacting with social media feel very different from
| sitting on a porch and whittling. One feels like I'm doing
| something in my brain. One feels like nothing.
| brimble wrote:
| > We just have something to do while we do nothing. Back in
| time we did not.
|
| Back when? TV and very low-value, low-effort reading
| (periodicals, comics, books) have existed for quite a while
| and filled many an otherwise idle hour. I think you'd have to
| go back to the 19th century to find a time when there weren't
| very cheap options available to fill idle hours without
| effort. They still had cheap low-value books and such (penny
| dreadfuls, for instance) but volume and availability was more
| limited, so do-nothing entertainment wasn't quite as
| plentiful.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| > We just have something to do while we do nothing. Back in
| time we did not.
|
| I think we did. We could read a book, do puzzles,
| draw/doodle, carve a chunk of wood, watch the clouds, etc.
| That's about the same level of exertion as watching videos or
| posting on HN.
| jsiaajdsdaa wrote:
| My dog also does nothing when not prompted, and he seems to be
| surviving just fine.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Your dog is convinced you will provide it with food and drink
| and other care until it dies(until you don't: it will look
| elsewhere eventually). I think if that would be the same for
| humans, things would be different. It seems it is something
| people strive to achieve even though when it finally happens,
| they won't be able to handle it. Dogs contemplate the passing
| of time and the waste (this is our sentiment, not inherent to
| nature) not at all in the same manner.
| jsiaajdsdaa wrote:
| Interesting comment. As a human, I could quite easily procure
| food and drink that would last me for maybe a decade. I could
| also get firewood and medicine and some books so that I could
| entertain myself in a bunker in the event I wanted to live
| like that.
|
| I think if a dog realized that food/drink isnt coming, he
| would go into feral mode and go hunting for that. But upon
| being satisfied, he would take a break for a bit, because he
| doesn't have the concept of stockpiling or calculating his
| long term needs.
| UglyToad wrote:
| As appears in Debt by David Graeber [0]:
|
| Missionary: Look at you! You're just wasting your life away,
| lying around like that.
|
| Samoan: Why? What do you think I should be doing?
|
| Missionary: Well, there are plenty of coconuts all around here.
| Why not dry some copra and sell it?
|
| Samoan: And why would I want to do that?
|
| Missionary: You could make a lot of money. And with the money you
| make, you could get a drying machine, and dry copra faster, and
| make even more money.
|
| Samoan: Okay. And why would I want to do that?
|
| Missionary: Well, you'd be rich. You could buy land, plant more
| trees, expand operations. At that point, you wouldn't even have
| to do the physical work anymore, you could just hire a bunch of
| other people to do it for you.
|
| Samoan: Okay. And why would I want to do that?
|
| Missionary: Well, eventually, with all that copra, land,
| machines, employees, with all that money--you could retire a very
| rich man. And then you wouldn't have to do anything. You could
| just lie on the beach all day.
|
| [0]: https://timothynoah.substack.com/p/the-guy-who-explained-
| wha...
| recuter wrote:
| I'll do you one better, worth a read:
| https://www.ninalp.com/ART/Papers/How_Much_Land_Does_A_Man_N...
|
| Of course, the author started out wealthy.
|
| Incidentally doing nothing occasionally adds up to something,
| where-as doing something often amounts to nothing. Most of you
| are reading this at work after all.
|
| Maybe there is something to how we define terms and measure
| things.
| [deleted]
| slothtrop wrote:
| The other side to this is that the aforementioned lifestyle is
| usually described as impoverished (and a product of injustice,
| not choice). It cannot be the case that living by meager means
| is at once virtuous/satisfying, _and_ terrible. I vaguely
| detect a kind of cognitive dissonance about this.
|
| And to be clear, extreme poverty has its own clear definition
| by the UN, which does not apply here. Poverty is simply: the
| state of having few material possessions or little income.
| Presumably, like this Samoan.
|
| Does the romanticization go any further than poverty tourism?
| This reminds me that Thoreau is popularly denigrated today for
| being hypocritical, but no one seems to make the connection
| that it's for (more or less) the same thing. If someone is very
| well shielded from possible deleterious effects of the state of
| poverty ( _not_ including food and shelter), they 're still
| benefiting from wealth directly or indirectly.
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| That's a nice write up, bookmarked to share, thank you.
| vkou wrote:
| It's missing the second part of the story, where a more
| pliable Samoan is identified, the missionary enters into a
| capital-business-acumen partnership, the two bribe the
| government to take control of all of the productive coconut-
| growing land, and the first Samoan gets to enjoy the rest of
| his life as a wage laborer. He will do backbreaking labour
| for 70 hours a week, until he dies at ~55.
|
| Idleness is all well and good, until someone with guns
| decides that they'd rather have you spend those hours earning
| a profit for them, instead of lazying around.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Laying on the beach all day is a lot more enjoyable when, when
| you're done, you have a nice, safe home to go back to, good
| food, health care, etc. It's easy to romanticize having nothing
| but real life is complicated. Living primitively is simple but
| it's not easy.
| Aunche wrote:
| Doing nothing and relaxing in a tropical paradise sounds great
| until everyone else gets the same idea and wants to do the same
| and moves there. Then, your island is no longer self
| sufficient, and the only jobs locals are qualified for are low-
| skill services for foreign tourists.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| api wrote:
| This line of reasoning is the same as the line of reasoning
| behind the idea that hunter-gatherers had it better than we do.
| It works until:
|
| - Your kid breaks their leg.
|
| - A natural disaster destroys your home.
|
| - You get cancer.
|
| - Psychopathic marauders sack your town and rape and kill
| everyone.
|
| - A draught causes a famine.
|
| - Your baby is born with a birth defect.
|
| ... and so on.
|
| I strongly suspect that humanity set off on its endless hedonic
| treadmill ride to the stars not because we were dissatisfied
| with the median of the status quo but because we were
| dissatisfied with the edge cases.
|
| Today's technophilia is framed as a run toward a glittering
| future, but I think we started this journey by running away
| from random misfortune and cruel circumstances. The whole idea
| of running toward anything is fairly recent vintage, probably
| enlightenment era onward, though it has some antecedent in
| Christian eschatology with the idea of salvation being a
| novelty or in the future vs being in the past.
| pydry wrote:
| Hunter gatherers were, if anything, healthier and almost
| certainly happier than their agricultural counterparts but
| the latter outcompeted them due to their greater ability to
| wage war.
| whatshisface wrote:
| There is a lot to learn from the history of technology, but I
| think the real explanations are:
|
| - People working across thousands of years for independent
| and poorly understood reasons, that set up combinations of
| circumstances that suddenly clicked in to place. (Initial
| breeding of animals and plants for agriculture,
| mathematicians unknowingly laying the groundwork for
| mathematical sciences.)
|
| - People working to further their own immediate interests.
| (Every industrial development.)
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Haha, joke is on us, masters of the world:
|
| Those listed "edge cases" are just as dangerous to even
| Americans in the land of for-profit health care and psychotic
| housing values.
|
| So back to the Samoans, you are now working near-slave-labor
| to be exposed to the same effective dangers, abstracted via
| financialized debt.
| bmitc wrote:
| Hunter gatherers _did_ have it better than the early
| agricultural societies. They worked much less during any
| given day, lived longer, and were healthier. Hunter gatherer
| societies can live as long as people in modern, developed
| societies.
|
| You're ignoring the amount of stress and mental disorders
| skyrocketing in modern societies. With those, it makes a
| human life almost a tragedy, stretched out due to modern
| medicine and protocols keeping people alive.
| gruez wrote:
| >Hunter gatherer societies can live as long as people in
| modern, developed societies.
|
| Yeah theoretically if nothing bad happens to you you can
| live to 80, just like people in developed countries. The
| difference is that all the random causes of death (eg.
| dysentery, or infection because you cut yourself) drags
| down the life expectancy down to significantly below 80. In
| other words, people in "modern, developed societies" living
| to 80 is the average outcome, but for hunter gatherers that
| might be the 99th percentile outcome. Your comment casually
| ignores this.
| slothtrop wrote:
| I think you mean better than early North American settlers.
| Agriculture is quite old, and integral to the birth of
| Civilization. Not really clear what the disparity might
| have been at the onset, though it might have been a hybrid
| system. It seems that even some indigenous societies in the
| Americas experimented with agriculture.
|
| > You're ignoring the amount of stress and mental disorders
| skyrocketing in modern societies.
|
| That might say something about developments in technology,
| or wealth inequality - not so much society revolving around
| agriculture.
| bmitc wrote:
| No, I meant all the way back to the birth of agriculture.
| See _Against the Grain_ by James C. Scott.
| slothtrop wrote:
| A bit skeptical since he wrote Seeing Like A State but
| I'll put it on my list.
| bmitc wrote:
| What were your issues with _Seeing Like a State_? I haven
| 't read it myself yet, so I'm curious.
| UglyToad wrote:
| To give a +1 here, I think Against the Grain makes a nice
| companion to Debt from what I assume are separate ends of
| the left-right spectrum within libertarianism, or at
| least I guess so from Against the Grain having a positive
| review from the Cato Institute on the cover.
|
| They both construct convincing narratives from looking at
| the history that deconstruct the "just so" stories of
| economists. From AtG you see how most of 'civilization'
| throughout history has been experienced by most people as
| slavery and warfare and living standards actually
| improved, or at least didn't become much worse, for many
| with things like the fall of Rome.
|
| Debt is fascinating because it shows just how new and
| novel the current inescapable logic of capitalism
| actually is. Adam Smith's fanciful notion of a fully
| formed civilization of shopkeepers who adopt coinage to
| streamline barter is shown to be complete nonsense and
| with it the foundations of much of "assumed" thought
| about how people and markets organise themselves.
| noodles_nomore wrote:
| So that in the first place, I put for a generall inclination
| of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power
| after power, that ceaseth onely in Death. And the cause of
| this, is not alwayes that a man hopes for a more intensive
| delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot
| be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot
| assure the power and means to live well, which he hath
| present, without the acquisition of more. -- Hobbes
| UglyToad wrote:
| There's more discussion of Hobbes in the book than can
| reasonably be quoted since it links in to themes developed
| across chapters, but for a taste:
|
| "I want to draw particular attention to the underlying
| notion of "self-interest". It is in a real sense the key to
| the new philosophy. The term first appears in English right
| around Hobbes' time, and it is, indeed, directly borrowed
| from interesse, the Roman law term for interest payments.
|
| When it was first introduced, most English authors seemed
| to view the idea that all human life can be explained as
| the pursuit of self-interest as a cynical, foreign,
| Machiavellian idea, one that sat uncomfortably with
| traditional English mores . By the eighteenth century, most
| in educated society accepted it as simple common sense."[0]
|
| Hobbes statement of some fundamental truth of human nature
| is both newer and less open-and-shut than we assume.
|
| [0]: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents
| /under... p 331
| ManuelKiessling wrote:
| Wait, am I understanding this correctly: Graeber stole that one
| from Boll?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekdote_zur_Senkung_der_Arb...
| UglyToad wrote:
| I initially said "with credit to Graeber" but as he
| acknowledges in the book it's from someone else, I guess
| here. I just find the Kindle UI too hostile to actually
| bother and pull out the full attribution so settled to "from"
| the book so readers could locate the citation.
| [deleted]
| Epiphany21 wrote:
| A distinction is made between being idle and napping, but are the
| researchers sure they aren't just resting? When I work outside on
| hot days I often take breaks in the shade where I just sit and
| stare. I'm not hungry or thirsty and it's not time to clean up
| yet, but I need a break.
|
| >The median adult spent ~27% of their waking time doing nothing
|
| 20-30% idleness sounds like a perfect description of the
| cumulative break time I take on days that are mostly manual
| labor.
|
| Maybe the researchers should've just asked them directly.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| exactly; resting is not dissimilar to napping. And in hot
| climates, doing nothing (not moving) has the advantage of not
| producing heat, i.e cooling.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| It's another study typical of social scientists who don't
| understand statistics trying to pass off their political views
| as science. If you look at the graphs presented the 95%
| confidence intervals range from no correlation to positive to
| negative correlation, sometimes in the same graph. And R^2 is
| sub 0.3 which means even the correlative effect is incredibly
| weak. Yet somehow the authors come to the conclusion that there
| is a "strong positive association [between commercial labor and
| total work time]". Did they look at the same graphs we're
| looking at?
|
| edit: on top of that, they assume a linear relationship between
| commercial work and total work when half their graphs display
| extremely nonlinear behavior and the data clearly does not
| support a normally distributed regression coefficient. This is
| really bad science.
| Daishiman wrote:
| I'll take the social scientists who have man-decades of
| direct observation and interaction with said tribes over your
| random layman speculation.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| I'm not speculating, I'm pointing out how their data
| analysis is grossly flawed because they don't understand
| the statistical methods they're using. Maybe your own
| political bias is showing.
| Epiphany21 wrote:
| When you have the data in hand and you're still making
| appeals to authority, you've lost the plot entirely.
| ryan93 wrote:
| the data shows a lot of time spend doing nothing
| Epiphany21 wrote:
| You don't say...
| lazyant wrote:
| This book (like a review of it) has shown up in HN before
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42771901-how-to-do-nothi...
| tinalumfoil wrote:
| Isn't this study just comparing Apples to Oranges? Doing nothing
| isn't doing nothing. If you're doing a manually intensive task
| and and sit down and do nothing you might be (1) resting or (2)
| thinking about how to proceed.
|
| > random individuals or groups of age 15 y and above were
| selected for observation at random times in the day using tables
| of random numbers. The anthropologist located the relevant
| individual and recorded the activity in which they were engaging
| at the moment they were spotted by the anthropologist, to avoid
| changes in behavior caused by the researcher's presence.
|
| > These were con- structed by the diary method, in which each
| subject precisely recorded (in their own words) the activities
| they were engaged in during each 5- to 10-min interval of a
| previous 24-h period
|
| Come on now, these two methods are not producing comparable
| results.
| pdimitar wrote:
| > _If you 're doing a manually intensive task and and sit down
| and do nothing you might be (1) resting or (2) thinking about
| how to proceed._
|
| No on your point 2. Anxiety about the future isn't a downtime,
| this has been all but proven with many modern studies. Stress
| kills, I don't think this is debatable nowadays.
|
| "Doing nothing" is a stress free time, whatever it is that your
| physical body is doing during the time e.g. people tending to
| their garden.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Since when does planning ahead have anything to do with
| anxiety???
| pdimitar wrote:
| Do enough of it every day, multiple times a day, for 10+
| years, and you'll see. :)
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I've already spent the last 10 years
| thinking about how to proceed multiple times per day and
| I'm only in my 20s... It seems hard _not_ to do that.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| It's not about the definition, it's about the methodology of
| collecting the data.
| pdimitar wrote:
| What about it? It's hard to gather 100% accurate data on an
| entire tribe of people.
|
| What are your reservations against the tweets?
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| The parent points out that the methodology is flawed:
| while you're right that sitting down may still be work,
| the way of recording activities does not take this into
| account.
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