8.25 | in celebration of doing nothing

Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.
– Albert Camus

✉️ letter #5

This is actually a reminder to myself in the middle of a non-stop week that has lasted from... well, tbh I don't know when this "busy period" exactly began or how long it's been around.

I started a digital journal at the beginning of the year, and looking back at half the entries from then, I was already admitting I was close to burning out.

Eight months in and since nothing has truly changed, I am most likely some kind of charcoal right now.

Occasionally, I rally and carve out time to do something creative for myself, like this newsletter (which I'm compiling at the end of a very long day).

But using the momentum of a workday to carve out my own space is one thing. When it got to last (and last last, and last last last) weekend, any attempt to drag myself out of bed and not completely disassociate into brainless content - mobile games! cheesy anime! - felt physically painful.

And I was shame spiraling because of it. I wasn't using those days well. I wasn't gaining anything back for myself. The universe had given me 10 hours of alone time so why couldn't I make it productive for me?

Then I was reminded that, you know, it's kind of natural for animals to do absolutely nothing. In fact, it contributes to their longevity.

This is true of apex predators like lions, which spend over 14 hours of the day just lying around chilling out. In fact, most carnivores seem to expend their energy only in short, small bursts and otherwise sit around, hanging out, sleeping and grooming and lightly playing with the rest of the pride.

But it's also true of the worker ant, basically the animal world metaphor for industriousness. In 2015, University of Arizona biologists reported that most "workers" in an ant colony spent the vast majority of their day doing nothing.

And pre-capitalism, it was true for humans. For a video I've been researching, I came across the statistic that modern people work way more than their medieval peasants peers. Very few peasants had work hours that extended past 8 hours of the day, those 8 hours had copious breaks, and they tended to also experience around 25 weeks of vacation from any work at all.

Even for us more productive folk, science has shown that rest and do-nothingness is essential for fostering both creativity and general wellness for human brains and bodies.

No wonder my brain is just this right now:

Ironically, my job had covered how a lot of people in China were feeling this way and choosing to "lie flat" in the face of constant progress leading nowhere.

Why this “Involuted” Generation of Young Chinese Are “Lying Flat”

Unhappy, stressed and exhausted with work, China’s millennials and Gen Z choose the philosophy of “laying flat”

RADII | Stories from the center of China’s youth cultureSiyuan Meng

Why the heck not? I'll take that rest after I finish this newsletter, I swear.

🌱 the ethical ideas newsreel

• Could shifting the "dietary staple" from rice to potatoes actually help China cut carbon emissions by 25%? I blanched at first, but then thought about how many insanely delicious mashes this would make. Charsiew pork over potatoes? Yangzhou fried potatoes? Potato congee? Hang on a second... I guess that would just be potato soup.
• Moderna, which most people now know from the COVID vaccine, are also fighting against the pandemic of HIV/AIDS. They are scheduled to begin human trials of a mRNA-based HIV/AIDS vaccine this month which will conclude in spring 2023.
• A novel idea for getting the funding to climate proof cities has come out of Ithaca, New York: using private equity to raise the $100 million it says it needs to fund its Green New Deal for residents.
• Six years after the Paris Agreement, a lot of vulnerable countries are complaining that the global goals are "unacceptably vague." They are hoping to focus political attention on the issue at the next UN climate summit, Cop26, in November.
• "When it comes to climate, the Good News is the News." According to Sustainability Times, "A research team... reviewed 4,856 newspaper articles published between 2005 and 2019, and found that 90 percent of the sample accurately reflected climate change and the science that supports it." I hope I'm contributing to that effort!

🎵 song of my week

One of my favorite now defunct podcasts is Punch Up the Jam, which recreated classic (but perhaps imperfect?) musical hits to be "punched up somehow." For the most part, the final songs end up being hilarious and irreverent parodies.

I just got to listening to Demi Adejuyigbe's punch up of Train's Drops of Jupiter where, in order to make the lyrics make sense, he turns the entire song into a vision quest of a space movie pop culture junkie confronting their astronaut friend about what they've been doing all this time.

It is solid gold. I replayed this part of the podcast about six times, laughing all the while.

✨enjoying: one final piece of pop culture fun

I think the above kind of counts as "pop culture fun" too so I'll take this space instead to confess something.

I watched four episodes of Sandra Oh's new Netflix show The Chair and I did not enjoy it. Looking at the gushing reviews from media (and friends!), I seem to be in the minority.

It took some searching, but I did find one voice of dissent that's emboldened me to possibly add my take to it. Perhaps next week!

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