The Fine Art Of Doing Nothing

This is about nothing

[thefineartofdoingnothing]

Insurance executives who incentivize organizational behaviors that are incompatible with the provision of healthcare - such as denials based on preexisting conditions, cat-and-mousing cancer patients until they die, and refusing to cover medications such as insulin - should immediately be catapulted into the sea. In fact, anyone who believes that healthcare should be run for profit should be promptly launched into the ocean. Rescue will be initiated after an administrative review to be sure that their plan covers open-water search and rescue.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

[thefineartofdoingnothing]

It is exhausting to live in a society where nobody in power seems to care about people unless they are viewed as capital.

[bastardofficial]

died and came back as a cowboy i call that reintarnation

[thefineartofdoingnothing]

How is it that social media can demand and be given so much of our attention?

[whitepeopletwitter]

[thefineartofdoingnothing]

Where is the lie? I have a good white-collar job with health insurance and I’ve had to pay almost $10,000 out of pocket for surgery after I shattered my elbow. And even despite that, I have it good compared to your average American.

I can’t imagine how screwed people who don’t have access to meaningful health insurance would be in this situation.

[depsidase]

[smegma-factory]

YOUR BABY SHITTING?! ? GIVE HIM SOME HEROIN!!!

[thefineartofdoingnothing]

I farted. Gimme some opium.

[whitepeopletwitter]

[thefineartofdoingnothing]

I think this poster has the right idea. It’s okay not to have a sense of purpose.

[whitepeopletwitter]

[thefineartofdoingnothing]

Lacey Williams Henschel is 100% correct.

The millennial experience is growing up being told to go to school and better yourself, then being mocked and derided for getting educated while also getting blamed for the inevitable collapse of Boomer institutions that never bothered to evolve.

The millennial experience is assuming that the “#1 country on earth,” which we pledged allegiance to religiously, would take care of us if we were sick or hungry. *Narrator voice* It did not take care of them when they were sick or hungry.

The millennial experience is being used as a product by student lenders and exploited by colleges that scammed us.

The millennial experience is needing a bailout after the third consecutive “OnCe In A LiFeTiMe” financial crisis wiped us out, only to be told that we should just have more money.

And when we say “nobody is here to help us,” the boomers say “fuck you, I got mine.”

[whitepeopletwitter]

[thefineartofdoingnothing]

The two sides are not the same.

[wilwheaton]

(via dvox86jh8fa61.jpg (1170×955))

[fatmaninalittlesuit]

[thefineartofdoingnothing]

To the extent that there is some sort of objective reality it’s amazing how many people simply choose not to exist in it.

What’s truly alarming is how willing they are to use violence to push their reality into ours.

[atropos-moth]

[thefineartofdoingnothing]

I saw a piece of decor listed as “rustic vogue” but I thought it was “rustic vague.” I like the idea of being vaguely rustic. Yeah, I live in a subdivision. But I bought some chickens and the HOA can blow me about it. They live in the back, near the Association Approved Fence Line. They come out to scratch around in the Generic Landscaping and eat bugs, and I’m drinking whiskey out of a bottle and following them around, nodding at passers by who are suddenly vaguely concerned that the neighborhood is turning rustic. Y’all heifers wanna put chickens and farmhouse signs up everywhere but can’t handle a real hen in the yard.

Rustic Vague. I like it.

[butchdotgov]

Millennial Sisyphus keeps entering all the information from his resume into the web form, only for it to delete everything when he tries to move to the next page. He just goes back and types it all up again, over and over again, forever, and he never gets a job.

[crystalandrock]

Millennial Tantalus has been promised that his unpaid internship will become a paid position as soon as the company has space for him. Every week he sees their new job posting. Every week he asks his boss if he can have a real job. The boss shrugs apologetically and says he’ll just have to make do with being paid in experience a little longer. He goes back and keeps working, over and over again, forever, and he never reaches the fruits of his labors.

[fiftysevenacademics]

Millennial Persephone can’t get a job without a degree, but because she had to take out loans to pay for college, she must spend 1/3 of her life working just to pay them off.

[sci-fantasy]

Millennial Cassandra’s title is Social Media Coordinator, she was hired to be the expert, but every time she tries to explain the problems in her company’s social media decisionmaking, the managers don’t listen…and end up hiring expensive PR flacks to repair the damage to their reputation when things blow up exactly as she predicted.

[necrofuturism]

Millennial Medusa uses multiple shades of primer and opaque foundation to cover the scars snaking across her face, hiding the bruises, aligning the asymmetry in her broken nose and jaw. Red matte on the lips, green shimmer on the lids. Flawless liner on the first try. She’s had lots and lots of practice. She films her transformation in secret for all to see and learn, and again, men are turned to anonymous stone faces screaming in horror. “Liar!” “Witch!” “Take her swimming on the first date!” These words do not discourage her. These words are a challenge. GlamGorgonXx posts another video.

[mao-tenno]

Millennial Prometheus uploads another PDF to his site. He’s lost track of the printing and edition of this textbook. He knows they just rearranged some of chapters then charge 150 dollars per copy, and the professor wrote the book himself. the ZIP fills uploads successfully, and he starts uploading the next one. He isn’t afraid of the potential lawsuit. knowledge shouldn’t held out of reach like this. 

[i-will-not-be-caged]

Millennial Circe screenshots all the lewd messages she gets from men on online dating sites and posts them on her very popular Instagram along with their pictures and usernames. When people accuse her of attempting to destroy their reputations, she insists she’s just revealing them for the pigs they truly are.

[incorrectgreekgods]

Milennial Pandora opens an email in her spam box. Oh, what’s this link? She clicks on it. Suddenly viruses and lags spread over her computer.

[thefineartofdoingnothing]

I have the enormous privilege of working a job where productivity is a nebulous concept - rather than a concrete number of products or services delivered, my productivity is mostly measured by how happy my customers are with the specific service I provide.

Mostly, my customers want someone to complain to - someone who will listen and at least pretend to do something about it. By simply offering my customers a space to complain about the very real absurdities of their workspace, and by bringing these complaints to various people in the organization, I am able to make people feel validated if nothing else.

So while I might actually “do” a number of things, much of what I do is effectively nothing. I don’t make anything. I don’t change anything real or tangible. I don’t even offer very much in the way of specific, novel knowledge. I simply exist, and wander about listening to people complain, and the act of being present and not bringing an agenda to the table creates an environment that helps people feel heard and feel less disempowered by the endless disembodied entity that we work for.

I do nothing, and I think I do a good job of it.

[thefineartofdoingnothing]

I have spent far too much time doing things. I think it’s high time to do nothing. Not developing any skills, not practicing anything. Not growing as a human or reading a book or screaming naked at the moon in a haze of THC. Just time to do nothing.

I’ve always been a fan of nothing. After all, we come from the void. There was nothing, but now there’s something; and better writers than I have explained how the creation of something from nothing was “widely regarded as a bad idea” (Douglas Adams.)

Even Samuel Shem in his seminal book “House of God,” which was highly influential to me when I worked clinically, expounds on the virtues of doing nothing and explains that often the best cure for overdiagnosis and overmedication is some good old nothing.

Void time.