Inactivities During Non Weekends

    When people ask me what I did over the weekend, sometimes I respond with 'nothing.' 

    "I did nothing over the weekend"---aside from breathing, eating, and sleeping. And aside from watching YouTube, calling my friends, and playing video games. A generic, but also quite pleasant weekend. There's a word to describe all those actions, to describe fun and relaxation: nothing. How does that make sense, describing action with inaction?

    Part of it is that there's a quite selective vision of what 'doing something' actually means. Often, it's not actually every activity we do, but only every action we consider useful. College essays and homework equals activity, games and calls and naps equals inactivity. In an effort to set apart one group of activities from another, we downgrade some actions to nothingness, and use "doing nothing" figuratively as a language tool to emphasize the usefulness of certain things over others. 

    I guess that's sometimes a useful way of seeing things. When time is limited, we have to hierarchize our actions, prioritizing essays over other uses of free time. If you need 2 hours to write an essay (very relevant dilemma right now), and there are 2 hours in the day remaining, action not spent on writing an essay---procrastination---is about as helpful as inaction. So, "I did nothing this weekend" really means "I didn't do the tasks which I was supposed to/planned do this weekend." Shame on me for my dysfunctionality.

    But on the other hand, outside of these urgent 'do or die' situations, where one task is of paramount importance, we still need time spent on relaxation. It's not sustainable to be in a constant state of stress and work and advancement. At some point we have to take a break. 

    The opportunity to 'do nothing' is motivation too. It's light at the end of a tunnel of work, a hope that some days down the line, there won't be anything required of you. I know that for me, the offer of a work-free weekend is a much stronger form motivation than "After you're done with this piece of work, you can do the next assignment, and the next, and so on until the end of time!" Imagine how much could be not done in your free time. Isn't that a wonderful promise to look forward to? 

    Leisure and idleness are inseparable parts of our lives---we 'do nothing' all the time. Instead of viewing it as a negative and trying to use language to incite us out of this low-productivity state, maybe we'd be better off occasionally embracing the bliss of inactivity.