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Wendell O’Brien says, ‘Just Don’t Do It’.

In a sense, every living person is always doing something – breathing, at least, or sitting in a chair – and even a dead man is lying in his tomb. There are nonetheless perfectly good senses in which a person, even if alive, may be said to be, at some time or other, ‘doing nothing’ or ‘being idle’. My primary concern in this essay is to defend idleness – not for everyone, and not all the time, but in moderation, for those who love and have a disposition for it.

In various Eastern traditions there are states sometimes conceived of as ones in which you do nothing. In Daoism, for instance, there is wu wei , or non-action, the sage’s customary mode of being.…