[Lifestyle] Why 'doing nothing, intentionally' is good for us: The rise of the slow living movement

[Wolf.17]

 

Is a slower, more mindful pace of life the answer to stress – or is it just another unachievable, privileged lifestyle brag? Meet the author who battled burnout with "a year of nothing".

How does the idea of doing nothing for a year sound? No work, no emails, no career progression, no striving or achieving or being productive. For many of us, such a thought might once have brought its own anxiety attack – surely, work is status, earning money is achievement, and being busy is a brag? But these days, a year of nothing is more likely to sound dreamy, even aspirational – there has been, as they say, a vibe shift.

 

 

Millennials are embracing the concept of #SlowLiving – the hashtag has been used more than six million times on Instagram (despite posting on Insta being fairly antithetical to its principles of a mindful, sustainable lifestyle, with much reduced screen-time). Gen Z, meanwhile, have pioneered quiet quitting and "lazy girl jobs", where one does the minimum at work to preserve your energy for the more meaningful parts of your life, be that hobbies, relationships, or self-care. And people across the generations are united to wanting to work less: in the UK, the concept of the four-day week is gaining serious traction.

To be facetious about it: hustle is out, and rest is in. And this is something Emma Gannon knows all about: the prolific author, podcaster, and Substack entrepreneur published A Year of Nothing – her account of taking an entire 12 months off – earlier this year. It quickly sold out when published earlier this summer, and has proved so po[CENSORED]r it will now be reprinted and available to buy in November. 

Not that it was, initially, a lifestyle choice: Gannon suffered such extremely bad burnout, she had no choice but to stop working. Her account of her year of rest and recuperation is now published in two small, sweetly readable volumes by The Pound Project, charting her journey back to health via gentle activities such as journaling, watching children's TV, birdwatching, and the inevitable cold-water swimming (which Gannon knowingly acknowledges is a cliché for "Millennial writers with their bobs and tote bags", but comes to love anyway).

Having been fully on-board with the girl-boss culture of the 2010s, Gannon had already stepped away from that with her last book, The Success Myth: Letting Go of Having It All, which explored how relentlessly striving for success rarely brings true happiness. But it was experiencing complete burnout that forced her to really confront the importance of rest.

 

"Looking back, there were lots of red flags – feeling very confused, pulsating headaches, not being able to focus on things in the room, quite scary stuff. But I over-rode it, [thinking]: 'I'm busy, I've got to crack on'," she recalls. Suddenly, in 2022, her body went into a forced shut-down mode. "Couldn't look at a phone, couldn't look at a screen, couldn't walk down a street without feeling fragile. It was the feeling that, 'oh you can't muddle your way through this – you have to stop'. Many people with chronic burnout have to get to that point before they'll take time off [work], because we're so conditioned in this society to push through at all costs.

 

"But we were designed to have naps, and [walks in] the park. To go for a swim, and look at the sky. That stuff's really important," Gannon insists. And she's determined to carry the lessons from her burnout, and her recovery, into a slower, more spacious life. "Nothing is worth your health."

But she's far from ploughing a lonely furrow, here – a scan of the self-help or pop philosophy sections of your local bookshop, or indeed a glance at the list of recommended reading at the back of A Year of Nothing, reveals a flourishing crop of books encouraging us to slow the heck down.

Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy became a sensation in 2019, linking our frazzled brains to how profit-hungry technology and social media use up our attention and distract us. She advocated re-wiring our awareness to the natural world around us, and to our own interiority.

Odell is also part of a wave of writers encouraging active resistance to the relentless "goal-oriented" expectation that, "in a world where our value is determined by our productivity", every hour and minute of our time should be put to good use – if not at work, then in self-improvement. Resisting the pressure to always be optimising can also be found in Oliver Burkeman's surprisingly comforting 2021 book Four Thousand Weeks – which reminds us that life is brief, and we will never get everything on our to-do list done. Rather than seeking to be ever-more efficient, he argues that we should focus on what really matters (spoiler alert: it's probably not hitting inbox zero), ditch perfectionism and completism, and live more fully in the present. 

 

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240724-why-doing-nothing-intentionally-is-good-for-us-the-rise-of-the-slow-living-movement