Photographed by Shaira Luna
Vogue Philippines features editor Audrey Carpio writes on one of life’s greatest luxuries.
In 2019, Jenny Odell published How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, a book based on a keynote speech that had previously gone viral online. In the same year, Olga Mecking’s New York Times essay called “The Case for Doing Nothing” was shared over 100,000 times, quickly leading to a book deal which resulted in Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing. Though the two authors approached the idea of doing nothing from different angles, both sought to reclaim for us some bit of time that is wasted on distraction or squeezed for productivity goals. It struck a chord with an audience who felt that society was reaching a tipping point of busyness and burnout, and those who noticed the damage that being endlessly online was doing to our humanity. As if on cue, the pandemic struck. Within a few months a lot of us became experts on doing nothing, and some of us learned to embrace it.
Over a week ago, I tripped and fell and broke my foot. It was a rather ignominious fall—I wasn’t doing sport, wearing high heels, or jumping off a ledge. It was just an unfortunate misstep over uneven terrain that landed badly, and now my foot is immobilized for the next six to eight weeks. I’m required to rest as much as possible and keep my foot elevated. As a mother of four, I’m used to frenetic mornings getting the kids sorted for school. I usually drive myself everywhere, doing household errands, attending work events, or shuttling the children to their various activities. Now I can’t do any of that, instead depending on other people to wait on me hand and, er, foot. For the greater part of the day, I’m parked on a couch in the living room. The days go by unremarkably, a time-lapse of activity and calm, light and dark. It’s kind of like being on lockdown again, except this time it’s not the world, it’s just me.
When Odell started visiting the Rose Garden near her home in San Francisco to go “do nothing,” she started noticing the birds. It was an act that she says requires you to quite literally do nothing. “Bird-watching is the opposite of looking something up online. You can’t really look for birds; you can’t make a bird come out and identify itself to you,” Odell writes. “The most you can do is walk quietly and wait until you hear something, and then stand motionless under a tree, using your animal senses to figure out where and what it is.”
“The days go by unremarkably, a time-lapse of activity and calm, light and dark.”
I remember one day in the thick of the pandemic lockdown, I drove around the village picking up food and sundries from various residents who started engaging in pandemic enterprises. I procured a bag of bread flour from one house, a potted plant from another, a crate of booze from yet another neighbor. I never saw another soul on the street; even as I picked up the items, it was handed through a gate or screen by a masked individual. It felt like an end-of-the-world scenario where everyone survived by trading basic commodities. I wasn’t doing anything productive myself. But I did notice each wilting leaf on my plants. I was paying attention to the hunger cues of my sourdough blob. I was acutely aware of when the sun shifted in the late afternoon (which meant it was time for a drink).
Of bird-watching, Odell said it changed the granularity of her perception, which had been “low-res.” She started by hearing birdsong more, then realized it was almost everywhere, all the time. In the Hitchcock film Rear Window, James Stewart plays a photographer bound to a wheelchair in a full-leg cast who has nothing to do for eight weeks except look out the window and watch the goings-on of his neighbors. Naturally, he notices when something unusual happens and suspects that one of his neighbors had killed his wife. Forced into a period of idleness, his sense of his environment sharpened. While I would rather wander a flower garden than creep on my neighbors, I can do neither, and have not much recourse than to lay on a couch and do niks all.
In Mecking’s book on niksen, the author describes herself laying on the couch a lot. But she’s rarely doing nothing: as a mother, she’s doing the emotional labor of planning and worrying about her kids and their needs; as a writer, she’s doing the creative work of mulling over her next article. Niksen is decidedly not reading a book, watching Netflix, or scrolling through Facebook. It’s not even practicing mindfulness or meditation, which requires focused thought. “To niks is to make a conscious choice to sit back, let go, and do nothing at all,” Mecking writes.
Niksen is not an exclusively Dutch concept. Countries the world over experience their own versions of the joy of doing nothing. The Italians partake in dolce far niente, the Spanish indulge in siestas, while Filipinos are experts on making tambay. But in today’s culture of constant optimization and acceleration, much of these traditions are being sloth-shamed by productivity gurus and LinkedIn cult leaders. I know I feel guilty for losing two months of my life to an injury when I should be out there grinding like everyone else. But should I? Maybe the universe has indeed given me the gift of time, the greatest luxury, to do nothing, but heal.
Photographer: Shaira Luna. Stylist: Neil Anthonie de Guzman. Makeup Artist: Zidjian Paul Floro. Hairstylist: Mong Amado. Producer: Bianca Zaragoza. Multimedia Artist: Tinkerbell Poblete. Photography Assistant: Emelito Lansangan. Model: Natasha of Luminary Models.
