Doing nothing part v: playing hooky

The joys of insouciant noncompliance

To find earlier posts in my Do Nothing series, here are parts 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Even as early as 1860, medic James Crichton Browne complained about the ‘velocity of thought and action’ required to live in the modern world. Browne worried about the stresses imposed on the brain forced to process in a month more information ‘than was required of our grandfathers in the course of a lifetime.’

That was in 1860. Imagine how Browne would react today, in a world of 1.5 billion cars, 9 billion mobile phones, 2 billion TVs, and 2 billion personal computers. The reason why we feel so busy is because the world around us is getting busier. And it’s getting exponentially more so.¹

In today’s world, we’re always accountable, always findable, always on. As our options have exploded, there are always more things to do. Everyone I know who remembers pre-2000 remembers of life as as slower, less harried. Now, every waking hour, we connected to the disembodied experience of a commoditized and commodified digital world, i.e. the system, i.e. the Matrix.

And we think it makes us happy.²

The mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote:

“You must have a room or a certain hour of the day or so where you do not know what was in the morning paper, where you do not know who your friends are, you don't know what you owe anybody or what they owe you - but a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are, and what you might be.”

We’re told we have to work for money. And in turn we should spend that money. As someone who doesn’t like doing either, I want to tell you an inconvenient truth: they are intimately connected: the more money you spend, the more you have to work.³ We have to find ways to be outside the system, outside of the cycle of production and consumption every day, even if for only a precious few moments.

Cutting class: the gateway drug

I used to be a good kid. Loved going to school, getting good grades, being praised.

And then senior year, after getting into college, I discovered the joys of cutting class. Telling the teacher I was sick and had to go to the nurse’s office. Or getting a fake permission slip to go to the bathroom and getting lost on the way. Or simply leaving school at lunchtime and trusting the system wasn’t going to process my absences fast enough to get me in trouble before graduation. Cutting class continued in college and law school; I probably only went to a quarter of classes. I used the time wisely: playing chess in the park, trying to read the NY Times daily front to back, having a leisurely lunch with the other miscreants. All the while, everyone else was sitting like suckers in class.

I wasn’t fighting the system, per se; I just wasn’t leaning into it. I was lying down.

And critically, it was so fun. There’s something so very delicious about the freedom of insouciant noncompliance.

Insouciant noncompliance

Insouciant. I love that word. One of my more ambitious law school classmates called me that and I’ve remembered it every since. It’s a French word that entered the English lexicon in the early 1800s, right around the time of the flaneur. Insouciant means “in”(not) and “soucier”(troubled or disturbed); to be free from concern, worry, or anxiety; nonchalant. Not caring about something that they are expected to take more seriously (by who?).

Insouciance is so wu-wei. The Dude is so insouciant.

There’s a wearying earnestness to modern capitalism. You’re supposed to always advance in your career. Immediately respond to others. Be fitter, healthier, more productive. Move up into a “nicer” (read: whiter) neighborhood, get more square footage, a bigger yard, buy more beautiful furniture or wall art. For the intellectual class and their inconspicuous markers of class: be increasingly interesting in music/books/movies you consume, the restaurants you frequent, and the places you go on vacation.

We spend most of our lives in a rat race, chasing each other and going nowhere.

Playing hooky is getting off the achievement, performance, display, self improvement treadmill. It’s a certain hour of the day where nobody knows where you are, and you don't owe anybody anything, you’re not doing anything. It’s precious time to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

If you made a list of everything you own, everything you think of as you, everything that you prefer, that list would be the distance between you and the living truth. — Stephen Levine

Fake speeches, six doctors

After Steve Jobs died, a deathbed speech, in all likelihood fake,⁴ emerged on the internet, where the founder of Apple realizes all his regrets. All his achievements were folly and success would have been really the love of one’s spouse, family, and friends. The essay says the best six doctors in the world are:

1. Sunlight

2. Rest

3. Exercise

4. Diet

5. Self Confidence

6. Friends

Again, Steve Jobs did not write this. But whoever did wrote a pretty good prescription for the cures for the diseases of modern life, illnesses that stem mostly from chronic stress, habitual disembodiment, and prolonged lack of connection: alcohol and narcotics abuse, obesity, depression, dementia, cancer, and heart disease.

The list is also a good description of playing hooky. Whether you’re a high school senior, or a senior executive, if you’re going to cut class, you’re probably going to move towards sunlight, rest, exercise, diet, and friends.

Making time, anything hookier?

“Put off envy, put on contentment. Put off gluttony, put on pure joy” - Sister Mary Jo Chaves (Douglas’s Franciscan teacher)

You may notice that what is really required for sunlight, rest, exercise, diet, and friends is time. For all the other things we think we earned through our achievements, the thing we lost was time.

And my friend Sarah Selecky would say, these prescription: sunlight, rest, exercise, diet, and friends, are the only ways to make time.

Staying in the work/spend cycle any longer than you have to is such a colossal waste of it. In other words, a colossal waste of life, your life. Ask any dying person how much they wished they had worked longer or they wished they could buy more things. No, they wished they had more time.

Of course, Financial Freedom, meeting your expenses with passive income, is just an extended version of playing hooky (next cohort starts June 15). Because I’ve made a lifetime commitment to be adverse to working and spending (again, connected), today I’m meeting my best friend Stefan to play soccer. For the last ten years, we’ve had this routine almost every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, unless something hookier is happening. After that, I go home to shower and nap. All the while, other people are working. We’re playing hooky, making a life.

How many more summers?

The NY Times columnist Charles Blow wrote this week about embracing aging:

The actress Jenifer Lewis, appearing on the nationally syndicated radio show “The Breakfast Club,” once remarked: “I’m 61. I got about 30 more summers left.” Since hearing those words, I’ve thought of my own life in that way, in terms of how many summers I might have left. How many more times will I see the leaves sprout and the flowers bloom? How many more times will I spend a day by the pool or enjoy an ice cream on a hot day?

I don’t consider these questions because I’m worried, but because I want to remind myself to relish. Relish every summer day. Stretch them. Fill them with memories. Smile and laugh more. Gather with friends and visit family. Put my feet in the water. Grow things and grill things. I make my summers count by making them beautiful.

In our society, we don’t really know what is wealth. So we sacrifice wealth in order to get more money to buy more things. But that’s not wealth. Wealth is all the things capitalism puts in the “doing nothing” category because you’re not producing or consuming. Those five Sabbath things I wrote about a few weeks ago.

Make time away from the disembodied experience of thinking, worrying, and planning. Escape the endless thoughts in your head and embrace your embodied aliveness and presence in the world. Slow down the velocity of thought and action. Make time to sit by the pool, enjoy your ice cream. Relish, smile and laugh. Gather with friends and visit family. Put your feet in the water.

Make time to play soccer. Make time to nap. Jesus once said:

“Truly, I say to you, unless you turn⁵ and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

There’s nothing more childish than playing hooky. It’s the joy of missing out; missing out on the things you’ll never find in the Kingdom of Heaven: producing and consuming.

When I was a kid, my man Ferris Bueller told me something: “life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop to look around once in a while, you might miss it.”

So if you have to, tell the teacher you’re sick and have to the nurse’s office. Write a fake permission slip for yourself to get lost on the way to the bathroom.

How many more summers? Make time every day to make time.

Play hooky.

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P.S. Learn the extended version of cutting class, Financial Freedom 1 starts June 15.

BONUS: For shits and giggles, comedian Ali Wong on her version of playing hooky:

1. If you want an example of how consumption drives climate change has accelerated, it’s travel. Between 1990 and 2019, passenger and freight air miles approximately quadrupled. In 2019, passengers traveled about 5 trillion miles: that’s almost the distance of a light year. (each miles is about a pound of CO2e).

When I was a kid, between the ages of 6 and 18, I flew once, for my grandmother’s funeral in Washington DC. Now almost everyone I know flies multiple times per year. Flying is not the problem. It’s the sheer volume of how much we do it.

2. I wrote this a year ago:

I’ve realized something even more basic, something so simple that we don’t understand the implications of it: capitalism rewards thinking. In turn, it deemphasizes caring. As capitalism absorbs more and more of culture, and take up more and more of our personal time, it’s happening to us too.

Look at the salaries of thinking professions (finance, management, engineering) versus caring professions (teaching, nursing, elder care). Ever thought about who gets paid more, and why? The most “successful” people I know are in thinking jobs.

Are you a “successful” person? How much of your job is about thinking versus caring?

There are two dangers to this type of “success”: First, you’re spending your life hours in a disembodied experience. Most “successful” people I know are in their heads all day. They spend 8-10 hours at a desk engaged in mental activity. They might “get a workout in” at the end of day. During breaks, they’re on the phone, responding to texts, reading news, scrolling through social media. The average human spends over 7 hours a day, almost half their waking life, in front of a screen and I suspect “successful” people spend more. How is that not an addiction? To spend 35 years of waking life front of a TV, computer, or phone is a poverty of presence. And most of the time, we think we’re enjoying it. That is a loss of life.

Second, you’re being rewarded for reinforcing and reproducing capitalist thought. Remember that we’re only thinking culture’s thoughts. By thinking so much about how to make an impact, how to scale, how to be more effective, or be “better,” we’re just reproducing an industrial improvement worldview where nothing is good enough and everything has to be improved and made bigger. And the hamster wheel is infinite: if you do this well, you’ll be rewarded for it. Then you’ll simply create a world of this for yourself and others. And you'll think it's success.

Most people I know are exhausted by thinking. But they are actually afraid of getting off the treadmill, because, when they do, they encounter the difficult sensations they’ve been stamping down while staying in their heads.

But thinking is disconnection from ourselves, from others, and from God. It’s part of our addiction to our not-enoughness. Our dissatisfaction with ourselves is the root of trying so hard to be “effective,” for “measuring,” and for “improving.”

3. And to climate change as well.

4. Falsely attributing quotes to Gandhi, MLK, Buddha, Einstein, or in this case Jobs is a way of making cool advice seem important and wise.

5. Most of the time the Greek word metanoia is translated as “convert.” But as per Father Richard Rohr, I prefer the translation as “a change of heart.”