The end of summer is finally in sight. While that may mean we finally start to see sub-100 degree temperatures in the Valley, it also means we’re coming to the end of vacation season.
And whether you’re staring down a new semester of school, or the busy season at your job, you may be feeling a little overwhelmed. But before you seek relief from the internet’s cottage industry of productivity and stress-reduction life hacks, Arizona State University professor Ron Broglio would like to propose an alternative. Broglio is also the director of the Humanities Institute at ASU.
As he recently suggested to The Show’s Sam Dingman: when you’re tempted to do something drastic, consider the opposite solution.
Full conversation
RON BROGLIO: To do nothing. Don't do any study work, don't do email. Do something for yourself. Remind yourself what it means to be human, why you're doing any of these things.
Just lay fallow. You know, we let the land lay fallow for a bit and it's, well, it looks like the land is not doing anything. It's actually being restorative, the nutrients are being restored. And so this is an invitation to do that on a micro scale.
SAM DINGMAN: Is this a practice you have put into place for yourself?
BROGLIO: It is. I've come from a religious tradition. So, both in the Catholic Church, where I was on a 30-day silent retreat, and in a Zen Buddhist context, where we would do like two week meditative retreats. And those kind of really deep experiences, you come up against yourself and just kind of confronting ourselves and being alone and not being able to distract and learning to be bored again, which is actually a valuable skill.
DINGMAN: And can you say at all, what you feel like taking these fallow periods for yourself, whether it's time in a hammock or meditation or silent retreat, what you feel like the taking of that time has enabled?
BROGLIO: One of the first things you notice, if you begin, you begin to notice things, you notice how you distract, how your mind wants to wonder and grab the things and distract itself. And then eventually over a few days, and it takes days really to just calm down and just be alone with yourself and begin to be comfortable with it.
And that means comfortable with things you don't like about yourself and things that you enjoy. And so it's a really, of deep sitting with the moment.
DINGMAN: This is a sort of radical proposition in the modern world. The idea that you would do something that has no concrete goal really, that voluntarily subtracts the non doer from the push to achieve or accumulate. And it is also kind of formless. It's such a threat to the algorithmically driven tuning that we all are sort of funneled into.
BROGLIO: We live in a world that has an imperative for ordering in efficiency. And why do we do this? For greater ordering and efficiency. And it continues on and on. And so this seems like something that's incredibly inefficient, right? Just this pause. And what that does is it jams the gears of a technological age of ordering efficiency to remind us that's not all that it means to be human.
DINGMAN: It also makes me think, I guess about the fact that we, we live in a, in a time when it seems like we have an infinite array of choices. And that at least just to speak personally often creates a sense of near paralysis for me because it feels like I could be doing almost anything right now. And what if I choose the wrong thing to do? And so the idea of choosing actually to not choose, it makes me think about the fact that there was a time when there were not as many choices. So there's a, there's a bit of a time travel element to it.
BROGLIO: You know, it's lovely. For me personally, it's part of embracing finitude. It's realizing that every choice we make means the death to other options. But then that choice is a commitment and without making any choice, we never arrive anywhere, right? So each choice is a loss, but that loss allows other gains and other things to open up. And so that choice to do nothing is a chance to kind of realize that, to come up against some of our limitations and our finitude, that we can't do it all.
DINGMAN: You know, you're also making me think though, that it also encourages us to confront something that is very uncomfortable to think about, which is that generally speaking, our lives are just the accumulation of choices that we make. So by, by choosing to do nothing for a little bit of time, it creates some space to reflect on the choices that we have made and what we've gotten from those choices. And if we don't like what they've added up to, we could make different choices.
BROGLIO: And even when it's difficult to say, you know, I only get this opportunity once, you know, this moment, even the moment of, of pause, this only comes once in the universe ever and then the next moment only comes once and so, realizing that we can stay with whatever we're working through.
DINGMAN: So we hear these ideas sometimes in conversations about the kind of world of productivity hacking and, you know, should we have a four day work week? And what are, what are the ways that we can optimize our, ourselves as workers, like doing more in a smaller number of days or, or, or something like that. But, but the end goal, a lot of times in this conversation is to get more out of our work life. And I am struck by the way you're talking about it because it does not seem contextually necessarily to be related to work.
BROGLIO: Right, yeah. So being part of the Humanities Institute, we're really interested in the human aspect of this. And the longer historical term, cultural aspects of these pauses. So the Sabbath, if we think within the Jewish tradition, this is the chance to pause and to step away from our work life and to realize there's a larger world, but even in a nontheistic context, it's a world outside of just labor.
DINGMAN: What kinds of reactions have you gotten from students, friends, people in your life to these ideas? And I ask that because I could imagine it really unnerving people, right?
[LAUGHS]
BROGLIO: I mean, you know, so being at a university when people found out about this, there was a sense of delight, there was a sense of kind of, wow, that's possible.
DINGMAN: I mean, I, I completely understand why it hits people as sort of delightful and absurd and surprising even though if you stop and think about it, what is actually absurd and surprising is the ease with which we have handed over the ordering of our life. But that's become the norm. This deeply human impulse is what is now seen as absurd.
BROGLIO: Yeah, it's a great resetting of norms. That's a great way of thinking about it. Just to reset what constitutes the norm.
