The Sacredness of Not Doing Shit….

 

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I could have a job, but am too lazy to choose it;
I have got land, but am too lazy to farm it.
My house leaks; I am too lazy to mend it.
My clothes are torn; I am too lazy to darn them.
I have got wine, but I am too lazy to drink;
So it’s just the same as if my cup were empty.
I have got a lute, but am too lazy to play;
So it’s just the same as if it had no strings.
My family tells me there is no more steamed rice;
I want to cook, but am too lazy to grind.
My friends and relatives write me long letters;
I should like to read them, but they’re such a bother to open.
I have always been told that Hsi Shu‑yeh
Passed his whole life in absolute idleness.
But he played his lute and sometimes worked at his forge;
So even he was not so lazy as I.

                                    — Bai Juyi, 9th century Chinese poet.

I can never forget the middle-aged “nontraditional” student sitting in my Chinese Philosophy class in college. The poor bastard must have wandered in unintentionally, or enrolled in classes so late that it was the only liberal arts class available and he needed one for his Business degree. He was a sloping white man with bristles of white hair twisting out from underneath a red trucker’s hat.

The professor, meanwhile, was a proto-hipster type. This was 2004 or thereabouts, and he was in his late 30s wearing Vans and a brown tweed jacket with elbow patches also brown, but of a lighter shade. He was visibly hungover and two days late on a shave, but he was in a good mood. He was at the white board creating some kind of graphic depiction of Confucian ethics.

“Arghhh!” The nontraditional student groaned.

I had never seen him in class before, and based on the response from the other students, his presence had come as something of a revelation to them as well.

The professor turned halfway toward the class, seemingly unsure whether he had actually heard what he had heard, or if he were experiencing residual psychological tremors from the molly he had ingested several nights prior.

He turned back toward the white board to resume his scribbling, and made a brief mention of the “rectification of names,” and then the nontraditional student groaned again.

Once again, the hipster professor half turned back toward the class, unwilling to commit to the idea of hearing actual sounds.

“What the hell is the point of all of this,” the nontraditional student erupted finally.

The eyes of every other student in the class darted with such force I swore I could hear a swoosh of movement.

The professor fully committed to his turn this time.

“Pardon?” the professor asked.

“This philosophizing shit. What is the point of it?” the nontraditional student clarified.

“I don’t — ” the professor offered.

“This philosophizing shit. What is the point? Don’t people have better shit to do?”

“This is a philosophy class,” the professor offered.

“It’s useless. All this philosophizing is useless.”

“Ah,” the professor offered, finally seeming to understand the gist of the man’s thrust. “But that’s only a problem to you because you have not yet read Zhuangzi, and thus you have not learned of the usefulness of the useless.”

The nontraditional student sat in the drenching silence.

“Philosophy is indeed useless,” the professor offered. “But that is precisely what makes it so useful. If you stick around, we’ll be getting to Zhuangzi around week eleven. It’s worth the wait.”

Then the professor turned back to the board to finish with his drawing, and the nontraditional student sat motionless for a beat too long, then rose from his desk, grabbed his Carhartt jacket and walked out of the classroom, never to be seen or heard from again.

Which is too bad, really. Because on week 11 we did get to Zhuangzi and to the “usefulness of the useless,” and it was one of those ideas that dropped like a bunker buster onto my mind.

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The usefulness of the useless is a recurring theme in Zhuangzi’s eponymous book, and there are at least a half-dozen episodes I can think of, off the top of my head, that clearly represent the idea.

One of my favorites is a story about a lumberjack out in the woods who crosses paths with an lumpy, gnarled, dilapidated tree. Its branches are withered and spiny, and twisted in ways that make it unusable for carpentry. The lumberjack is disgusted and comments aloud about how dumb and “useless” such a tree is.

Later in the night, however, as the lumberjack sleeps, the tree, who heard the lumberjack’s reckless remark, appears in his dreams and tells him, “Hey, who the hell are you, lumberjack, to call me a useless tree? It is because of my gnarled, useless wood that murderous lumberjacks like you have left me alone all of these years, allowing me to live out the fullness of my life. If you cannot see how my uselessness is precisely that which has allowed me to survive, then maybe it is not I who is a useless tree, but you who is a useless man.”

Another story is a vignette the recounts Zhuangzi and his best friend, Huizi. The two are out picking squash when Huizi stumbles across a gourd much too big to be used for anything. It’s too big to be carried back home, much less to be used in any culinary concoctions, or even to be served to animals.

Zhuangzi, taken aback, retorts, “You fool, Huizi, you call this gourd useless because of its size, but any idiot can see that it has infinite uses. For example, why don’t you cut it in half, put it in a creek, sit in it and relax as it carries you freely along with the current for the remainder of this divine afternoon?” And why not smoke a joint or drink a jug of wine while at it?

Of course these parables would appeal to my 20-year-old self. I was born lazy and listless. As a kid, I would often play hooky from school to sit around in my underwear eating Lucky Charms and watching The Price is Right and Maury Povich. It was heaven. To this day, an ideal day consists of sitting around watching Anthony Bourdain shows, reading true crime books and subsisting off a diet of ramen noodles and boxed macaroni and cheese.

In short, I’m pretty fucking useless. I’m too lazy to have developed any useful skills. I can’t paint, or play music, or speak a second language, or fix various problems around the house, or know how a car works.

And I’m thrilled to death about it. In fact, my equanimity is only disturbed when I’m forced to…do something. The kitchen sink is leaking, or the porch lights have gone dead, or a room needs to be painted.

Still, for the first 20 or so years of my life, I had developed a suffocating sort of self-consciousness because of my inherent laziness and uselessness. American society tends to frown upon such personality traits, and I often cursed at myself and at my creator for imbuing me with such socially repulsive inclinations. Why couldn’t I have been a pervert, I thought to myself, or a con artist? You know, real American heroes.

There are few things more distasteful to an American than a useless person — most often referred to as a lazy person. One of the few things that actually trickles down in capitalism is the idea that production is of the utmost importance. Well, not just production, but efficient production. Production denotes usefulness, but efficient production denotes the utmost usefulness.

So we’re taught to be useful at all times, either by actively (hopefully efficiently) producing something via the medium of our labor — from which someone makes their money — or by consuming something. Consumption is also useful because it makes someone, somewhere some money. If one is neither producing nor consuming, one is generally considered to be useless, because that person is not making some money for someone, somewhere.

Think about the distaste for the unhoused. It makes very little sense for the rest of us to gaze upon the bums with such disdain instead of pity, or even with something approaching basic human empathy. But we do disdain them, because they’re so useless. They don’t make anyone, anywhere any money.

But wasting time is one of our basic human rights. Being useless is a birthright. Anthropologists for the past 100 years or so have made careers out of noting how little time foraging cultures spend doing anything.

Studies of foraging cultures routinely show that they labor far less than civilized people. Where Americans, with all our technological progress and power, still must divest ourselves of our mandated 40 hours of work, at least, per week in order to justify our existence in a capitalistic society, foraging societies are routinely clocked working less than 20 hours per week. As technological prowess has increased to the point to where humans are able to produce at rates of efficiency unfathomable to people who lived even as recently as 100 years ago, we are still, for reasons not at all clear, required to put in the same amount of work time, and must also constantly be on alert for attempts by the capitalist class to increase that mandated work time, even though we accomplish more in less time than we ever have.

Anthropologists have long been trying to bring our attention to the amount of leisure time foraging peoples enjoy. One of those anthropologists, Pierre Clastres, is worth quoting at length, as he described the situation of certain foraging societies in South America thusly (emphases mine):

The Indians devoted relatively little time to what is called work.

And even so, they did not die of hunger. The chronicles of the period are unanimous in describing the fine appearance of the adults, the good health of the many children, the abundance and variety of things to eat. Consequently, the subsistence economy in effect among the Indian tribes did not by any means imply an anxious, full-time search for food […]. Take the case of the South American tribes who practiced agriculture, the Tupi-Guarani, for example, whose idleness was such a source of irritation to the French and the Portuguese. The economic life of those Indians was primarily based on agriculture, secondarily on hunting, fishing, and gathering. The same garden plot was used for from four to six consecutive years, after which it was abandoned, owing either to the depletion of the soil, or, more likely, to an invasion of the cultivated space by a parasitic vegetation that was difficult to eliminate. The biggest part of the work, performed by the men, consisted of clearing the necessary area by the slash and burn technique, using stone axes. This job, accomplished at the end of the rainy season, would keep the men busy for a month or two. Nearly all the rest of the agricultural process — planting, weeding, harvesting — was the responsibility of the women, in keeping with the sexual division of labor. This happy conclusion follows: the men (i.e., one-half the population) worked about two months every four years! As for the rest of the time, they reserved it for occupations experienced not as pain but as pleasure: hunting and fishing; entertainments and drinking sessions; and finally for satisfying their passionate liking for warfare.

Now, these qualitative and impressionistic pieces of information find a striking confirmation in recent research […] of a rigorously conclusive nature, since it involves measuring the time spent working in societies with a subsistence economy. The figures obtained, whether they concern nomad hunters of the Kalahari Desert, or Amerindian sedentary agriculturists, reveal a mean apportionment of less than four hours daily for ordinary work time. Lizot, who has been living for several years among the Yanomami Indians of the Venezuelan Amazon region, has chronometrically established that the average length of time spent working each day by adults, including all activities, barely exceeds three hours.

Another anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins christened this way of life the “original affluent society,” and argued a very Daoist-like notion that the secret to affluence that the foraging societies had recognized was in keeping one’s wants somewhat austere, and that thereby every member of the tribe’s wants could be easily ascertained. “Affluence not abundance,” was how Sahlins phrased it.

And, also, that the leisure time accrued by foraging societies (or pre-civilized societies as a whole) was a form of affluence in itself, allowing foraging people to engage in all manner of free play and various diversions. As Sahlins wrote, the foraging societies of Africa he studied had so much free time that, “half the time the people do not know what to do with themselves.”

When reading the literature on foraging living, one is struck by how little any of these people seem to do in their free time. A lot of their free time is spent just lazing about or half-heartedly playing with the children of the tribe, or using drugs.

Laziness — uselessness — the right to do nothing with our time has also been burgled from us. Karl Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, tried to warn us about this most dour form of our victimization at the hands of capital. In his essay, The Right to be Lazy, Lafargue refers to “idleness” as “the gift from the gods” and calls the infatuation with work, even among the leftists of his time, a “disastrous dogma” and pleads with the reader to not overlook the horrors of busyness, but to little avail. His essay is largely forgotten, and even in his own time, it was Marx no less who said of Lafargue, “if he is a Marxist, then I am clearly not.”

But Lafargue saw and described the sooted faces of the men, women and children arriving home after 14 hours of work, he knew and described the grisly deaths and dismemberments occurring in the factories, and he wasn’t sure the products of such torture were worth the trade-off. He wrote, “Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption.”

Maybe man is better not doing much of anything. No lazy person, after all, ever started a war, or created a nuclear bomb. No lazy person, no matter how odious their character, ever conducted a genocide.

Still, we are mandated — our livelihoods literally depend on — constantly producing and consuming those things which themselves don’t have any actual function beyond being bought and sold, and which are easily discarded when something new inevitably comes along to be bought and sold.

Therefore, laaziness is a form of nobility and of dignity, and one of the flagstones of freedom. Freedom from the incessent coercion of production and consumption. It is sacred, why else are there are so many different religions require their days of “rest.” That is why the profane Busy Ones are always trying to strip us of it.

People with no right or time to be lazy are ignoble and undignified, overworked and overstressed. Although even some of the greatest thinkers throughout history have denigrated and besmirched laziness, there have been those that have recognized its necessity. Dr. Johnson wrote an entire series of essays, more than 100 in total, defending the sanctity and benefits of “idling.”

Many others have pointed out that it is laziness that is the primary driver of most forms of innovation and invention. The writer Tom Hodgkinson has manifested an entire career for himself by lauding the merits of laziness, claiming, “Once you explore life outside of work, it becomes addictive. The less you work, the less you want to work. At first, the odd afternoon off seems like a fantastic luxury. Before long, you are opting for a four-day week. Then a four-day week becomes an intolerable demand on your time, so you find a way of moving to a three-day week.”

Even Tolstoy, for his part, said, “You can’t imagine what a pleasure this complete laziness is to me: not a thought in my brain — you might send a ball rolling through it!” (i.e. emptiness)

The pre-civilized lollygagging that Clastres and Sahlins described is indicative of the disorder which is our birthright, and which has been pilfered from us by The Great Thieves. In which our days and hours and minutes are free to look however we want them to look. To sit under a tree, halfway reading a book, allowing an entire afternoon to pass unproductively. To lay on the couch bingewatching Netflix television shows made by the Busy Ones. To walk along river banks, listening to the empty threats of the quacking ducks.

Or whatever other useless thing you can think of.

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One more Zhuangzi story (which is sort of a combination of the two referenced above):

Huizi spoke to Zhuangzi, saying, ‘I have a big tree, which people call useless. Its trunk is so knotted, no carpenter could work on it, while its branches are too twisted to use a square or compass upon. So, although it is close to the road, no carpenter would look at it. Now, Sir, your words are like this, too big and no use, therefore everyone ignores them.’

Zhuangzi said, ‘Sir, have you never seen a wild cat or weasel? It lies there, crouching and waiting; east and west it leaps out, not afraid of going high or low; until it is caught in a trap and dies in a net. Yet again, there is the yak, vast like a could in heaven. It is big, but cannot use this fact to catch rats. Now you, Sir, have a large tree, and you don’t know how to use it, so why not plant it in the middle of nowhere, where you can go to wander or fall asleep under its shade? No axe under Heaven will attack it, nor shorten its days, for something which is useless will never be disturbed’ Zhuangzi concludes, “All men know the use of the useful, but nobody knows the use of the useless.”

Are many Americans capable of understanding this kind of story?

With all that said, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Daoism itself is often accused of being a “lazy” philosophy/religion/way of life, and many of its adherents and propagators have felt compelled to challenge these accusations.

I never fully understood this defensiveness, though. Daoism, to me, does seem to propound the integrity of a more leisurely, dare we say “lazy,” certainly “useless” mode of living.

This inclination to defend Daoism against such name-calling stems, as far as I can tell, from the fact that anti-useless ideology permeates our environment to such a degree that we inherit it much like one inherits an orientation for “up” and “down” or “left” from “right.”

But I choose to believe the Daoist sages saw what I see: the life-affirming virtues of sitting around, the sacredness of not doing shit.