This weekend was an anomaly, not because I did fuck-all, but because I did fuck-all with abandon. I didn’t just do fuck-all and pretend to myself that I was going to be productive; I did fuck-all, all-out and unapologetically. I started the weekend with good intentions, with vague plans to make progress on selling my motorcycle, for example. Instead, the weekend was characterized by a progressive slide into conscientiouslessness.
By Saturday night, my commitment to achieving fuck-all had cemented and had achieved a kind of balls-to-the-wall intensity. It felt like I was a rock star in and hotel room with lots of chairs to throw around, except that there was no hotel room and no chairs. I’m also not a rock star; I program computers for a living.
Don’t get me wrong, my automatic obsession with getting things done did manage to trick me a little: I wrote a couple of articles, one of them pretty long, and I think I might have taken out the trash. I showered, and I spent some time with the in-laws, twice. But all of this productivity was accidental.
As the weekend wore on, and as I realized that nothing of any significance was going to be achieved, there was a sense of surrendering into it. I started wondering, “What will happen if I truly achieve nothing? What is the worst thing that could happen?”
Well, it’s Monday morning, and I can report that nothing happened, literally. I’m still here. The world is still here. Everything that was not done is still not done and it doesn’t matter. But something is a bit different. It feels like a heavy weight has been lifted just a little. There is a strong belief that unless I stay on that treadmill of doing then something terrible will happen. That belief is beginning to crumble.
