MBChB student Kavya Shankar on trying to find comfort in idleness
I’ve been trying to add “doing nothing” to my weekly routine, the way one might add yoga or journaling – and it’s going terribly. I’m bad at it. I overthink my underthinking. I suspect I used to be good at it once; now it feels like the most painful half hour of my life.
Leisure is a moral failing. Work is my religion – the more hours I sacrifice, the more virtuous I am. People who spend their weekends “catching up” are canonised; those who take naps are quietly pitied. Saints of labour versus sinners of sleep.
I sometimes wonder when being busy became a personality trait. We talk about our timetables the way medieval monks spoke about devotion – as a proof of worth. And so, when I try to do nothing, I feel vaguely heretical. There’s a small voice insisting I must earn my rest, as though idleness were a luxury rather than a human right.
The burnout brag
Burnout has become a badge of honour: exhaustion, a weird kind of status symbol. You can almost hear the brag: I’m so tired, I must be doing great. So, naturally, the second I try to sit still, I feel guilty. My brain goes on overdrive – running through anatomy flashcards I haven’t made, two weeks of laundry I haven’t done, emails I should’ve sent. Doing nothing feels like being caught doing something wrong.
The truth is, idleness is terrifying. It strips you of purpose, of the illusion that you’re indispensable. And without that constant doing, you’re left with the one thing you’ve successfully avoided all day: yourself.
When I say I do nothing, I mean it in the most spectacularly bad way. I lie on my bed, back stiff, staring at the ceiling like it owes me something. I track cracks in the plaster. I sometimes attempt “mindful breathing,” which quickly degenerates into rehearsing conversations I’ll never have.
Half the time I pick my phone up without thinking, scroll aimlessly, and tell myself it’s part of the experience- a modern form of meditation, maybe. Occasionally, I fall asleep, which feels like a win, except then I wake up thirty minutes later feeling guilty for having been unconscious.
I have tried sitting on the floor. I have tried leaning against a wall. I have tried sitting outside, watching leaves move in the wind. Every attempt somehow turns into a checklist in my head: Am I relaxed enough? Is this doing nothing correctly? Even doing nothing feels performative, and I am extremely underqualified. And yet, even in my spectacular failures at doing nothing, I’ve started to notice a few unexpected perks.
For one, I’ve noticed that my attention span is absolutely cooked. I flit from tab to tab, notification to notification, flashcard to flashcard, and somehow convince myself it counts as focus. Doing nothing- badly, inefficiently, embarrassingly, makes me confront that fact, and oddly, that’s liberating. Letting my brain wander without a single actionable thought sparks ideas I’d never notice in a schedule intricately carved into half-hour blocks. It proves that existing without earning a medal is, in fact, surprisingly satisfying.
In the end, failing at doing nothing is… fine. My attention span is ruined, the ceiling offers no cosmic insights, and yes, I still feel vaguely guilty about wasting time. But lying there accomplishing absolutely nothing is a small proof that the world does not collapse if I don’t supervise it.
Fifteen minutes of bad idleness, and somehow, nothing has gone wrong.
