I guess I could imagine this being tricky if you're stuck in a city apartment with no yard and no park nearby ...
You can close your eyes. Tricky if it's noisy - but then that's an issue in itself.
How to Exist
21–30 of 263 posts
Re: How to Exist
#22I know what the author means, but I don't share the experience.
Re: How to Exist
#23Great post. The author sounds like he loves life. Not a lot of BS to it.
Re: How to Exist
#24I kept waiting for the punchline of the author turning out not to be a human after describing in detail what it thinks of the human experience. The text has all the hallmarks of AI writing at least
Re: How to Exist
#25> It’s oddly difficult to do nothing, and while you’re doing nothing, it’s oddly difficult to feel at ease.
I don't have difficulty with this. Doing nothing, thinking about nothing, and simultaneously feeling perfectly at ease just comes naturally. I know that my experience is not universal and that many people do struggle with this. If you struggle with this and you were wondering, serenity really is very nice, and I wish I could share it, and I'm sorry that I can't.
Re: How to Exist
#26> When you stop doing everything and just exist, you almost feel like you’re dying. It sounds like the author drinks too much caffeine. This definitely isn't unusual in rat race culture, but it's also by no means the universal human experience.
Maybe "not unusual" is enough.
Re: How to Exist
#27I guess I could imagine this being tricky if you're stuck in a city apartment with no yard and no park nearby ...
The more you require to do this - walk to the park, a lawn, no noise - the less you will do it. In reality you could be locked in a prison and still do it.
Re: How to Exist
#28[deleted]
Re: How to Exist
#29In "Four thousand weeks" by Oliver Burkeman, he breaks down that this obsession with action stems to the industrial revolution when it was decided that workers should sell their time for a living.
Before that we used to have task-oriented jobs, like milking the cows, which you cant do more than once in a while, or harvest the fields, which you can't do until it's ripe. In general humans are more evolved to this kind of work given our 200'000 years of task-based genetics versus 150 years of time controlling your action.
Re: How to Exist
#301. Don't do anything 2. Be content The second rule conflicts with the first making this impossible. Any experienced meditator knows that to 'be content' isn't a passive action. You have to think to do it. If you truly practice no thought, there is no 'content' to be.
The article allows for breathing and blinking, but has an odd constraint of “don’t move”, which AFAIK will make one fight their own neural system trying to autoregulate arousal. I’m not an expert but in my limited understanding, remaining completely still is not “not doing anything”, it’s very active inhibitory action.
As an experiment, just get in a nice running shower, so your sensory system will get external stimulation. YMMV, but for me three minutes pass quick. I just did that and when I decided to check the time it was almost 5 minutes already.
Real “doing nothing” is just leaving things be, just chilling out and observing whatever is happening without actively participating - and three minutes is a pretty low mark for that, unless we’re talking about fellas with ADHD.