On Idleness
“Idle hands are the devil’s hands”
Growing up in Texas, summer remains such a bittersweet time. I always looked forward to being off from school, grinding my favorite video games, riding my bike with friends from the neighborhood, or buying ice cream in the shape of SpongeBob or Bugs Bunny from the truck that’d stroll by at sunset. As a teenager, I would still be grinding my video games, I would randomly go to the movie theater with different friends, or I would grill with one or two friends. On the flipside, I also dreaded those days when temperatures hit 90-100 degrees Fahrenheit (approximately 32-38 degrees Celsius). I felt the heat beat me to the ground and my mental health took a toll.
I remember talking to a classmate of mine one day, a few weeks before the end of the school year, and she had all these plans scheduled for the entire summer. She was going to practice softball on specific days and times, planned specific vacations her parents had scheduled, scheduled a visit with some extended family members for some days, and would participate in some other extra curricular activities for clubs/organizations. The list went on and on. Most of it involved things related to school or sports.
I contemplated for a bit before saying, “That’s a lot of stuff to have scheduled. Do you ever plan to just do nothing or do… whatever?” She replied to me, “I rather keep myself busy with a schedule. Idle hands are the devil’s hands.” Those words just stuck with me, and I have revisited that idiom under new light at different stages of my life.
As a mental health professional, I often have people tell me nighttime is the worst time of the day because that is when when they get racing thoughts, engage in catastrophic thinking, feel anxious, their fears intensify, they cry, fall back to bad habits, or doom-scroll. This is the case across many disorders, not just anxiety ones, and the reason for it is not at all accidental. When there is less external noise, it feels like your mind turns up its volume. The thoughts are there during the day, but they are less loud because you are focused on the activities.
“Living life in the fast lane” used to be something someone did for a while before settling into a quieter, comfortable lifestyle, but lately it feels as if we are all stuck with our engines over-revved chasing something unattainable. We are uncomfortable with idleness, silence, and we search for comfort from quick, short bursts of dopamine hits in the form of strong emotions. Social media has become a common dealer of dopamine. We cannot sit still with our thoughts, and the longer we go without facing them, the harder it becomes to sit with them.
We are uncomfortable with idleness, silence, and we search for comfort from quick, short bursts of dopamine hits in the form of strong emotions.
Idleness leads to boredom and boredom leads to the processing of thoughts and emotions. When bored, your brain defaults into analyzing and archiving thoughts and memories. For those that grew up with technology in the time of hard drives, as opposed to the newer, instant solid state drives, I like to compare this to disk defragmentation. Disk defragmentation is (or was?) a process in which scattered pieces of information on the old drives would be moved to be contiguous. We would do this periodically to maintain the drives because it reduced their wear and improved load times. A lot of processes just felt smooth afterward. Boredom and idleness are the human brain’s equivalent of disk defragmentation.
As technology has evolved, so has our perception of time and its perception. In a culture where pausing feels like the difference between staying relevant and being forgotten, one can easily fall into the trap of the rat race.
Breaking this pattern is not as hard as it seems. Make space for idleness. Sit in silence. Practice meditation. Schedule times or days without technology and/or social media. Spend time with others without expecting anything. Stop trying to fill your schedule down to the minute thinking that will make you successful, and just be present in the moment. Stop thinking of time as money. Time is more precious than money.