Doin’ It and Doin’ It and Doin’ It Well

There is so much pressure in today’s world to constantly be doing something. Listen around you.

“What are you doing?”

“What have you been up to?”

“What did you do this weekend?”

Yes, even, “Did you do her?”

What has society come to? Everyone has this immense pressure to always be doing something from the moment they’re born. “How is the baby doing?” they ask without hesitation in their voice.

Kids in high school today don’t get to be kids. Rather, they become mini pimple-faced, hormone-raged adults. These kids don’t go home to read “X-Men,” they go play sports for two hours and then work a shift at Old Navy. Even if they’re not in any after school activities they’re still going to be busy because of all the homework assigned to them. After all, what kid wants to be seen doing nothing?

When I was a kid, I was never good at sports, math made me shiver, and truth be told, I didn’t do homework every day. No, when I went home, I would sit down with the parents and get yelled at for swearing (fuck!) over the course of three lovely olive oil-based meals. I would then spend thirty minutes watching what Peter Jennings had to say before launching into a two hour NBA Live 2007 marathon. Despite what this blog may show, I turned out okay.

But parents don’t think this will always be the case. If you listen to them, they’ll often say that their kids will find trouble if not preoccupied by a coach and an incoming gang tackle on the field.  However, this doesn’t make any sense. First of all, how many kids would really join  a gang if they weren’t on the soccer team? Really? That would just be their second choice I guess. Second, has anyone even seen a real gang? Sure, some of the big cities like Detroit and LA have real gangs but the closest thing most of America has to a gang is two teens who accidentally show up to school wearing the same sweater. Also, most of America is white and that means that all they can ever be is wannabe gangsters anyway. Relax parents, your kids do not have gang membership on the back of their minds. Let them be kids and do nothing.

You move on in life to adulthood and feel the pressure to keep your social group updated on all that you’re doing. You’re on Twitter and Facebook constantly updating everyone with your day-to-day activities. Has anyone posted that they’re not doing anything or that they’re bored and admiring the intricate details of their ceiling with their second knuckle in their nostril? You can’t do that anymore.

At work, it’s even worse. When you walk into a job interview, you will get dinged if you don’t have experience since you have yet to do anything in the job world. As you build experience, you need to constantly be doing something. A resume is nothing but a laundry list of what you’ve done.

Once you’re in, you only need to do more. How did you do on the sales call? What did you do to improve last year’s quarterly results? Then there’s the constant need to multitask, which is of course doing multiple things at once but not as fun as those with dirty minds would think from this sentence.

I humbly suggest that we need to take our deep desire for doing more, elbow it straight in the eyelid, gut out its endocrine system, and toss it in a Ziplock bag outside of a playground! Why would I make such a hasty and violent suggestion? It’s simple: America and the world need to take a chill pill. We need to slow down and realize that no matter what happens, we’re all ending up dead. Of course we should try to make the world a better place and have personal accomplishments along the way, but not to the point where you can’t stop to enjoy coffee at the cafe rather than on the go. Or remember your kids’ names. Or take more than three lousy weeks of vacation to see the world. Can you imagine what people from 100 years ago would do if they knew how easily we could travel? Sit in cubes and work on charts, right?

Look at the animal kingdom and you’ll see my point. What does a cat do? Is it always productive? Is a dog? What about a weasel or a cheetah? All of these animals, dumb critters that they are, do nothing and save their energy. That way, when it’s time to work, they’re able to perform at their peak. It’s worked great for millions of years and maybe, just maybe, we could learn from them.

Still not convinced? Well, this is what doing nothing can look like:

Now what was I talking about? I forgot what I was doing…