We Need to Talk About Nothing
The question of whether to do something or nothing is an important philosophical rabbit hole to fall into, together.
Kids are excellent at doing what I would call nothing. Pieces of garbage they find on the ground can be combined in order to create various forms of inedible “soup”, or to become a gathering of imagined beings. They can pass hours making colored marks on a page that look like nests of nothing at all, or building uninhabitable topsy structures from Legos. I have a kid who is six years old and I am endlessly amazed at her ability to hold time at bay with this sort of aimlessness. She doesn’t even purport to have the goal of finishing things. She immerses herself in the act of “soup” creation simply for the pleasure of finding objects to mix with leaves and dirt.
It’s with the utmost respect that I call this sort of engagement “nothing.” I have the work of Jenny Odell in mind, when I refer to it this way. I’m thinking about nothing—doing nothing—as a way of taking back our time. As a refusal of the politics of exhaustion, and the exploitation of labor. I’m thinking about doing nothing as a way of rejecting the attention economy, which sometimes feels like it’s sunk so deep into my veins that I’ve become its puppet. I’m thinking about how incapable I’ve become of allowing myself the leisure and pleasure of being unproductive. It’s because I’m so bad at doing nothing, in fact, that I’ve wanted a dog for years now. I’ve wanted someone else to keep yanking me out of my endless productive drive, the way my kid does. It drives me crazy because my rational mind has convinced me that my deepest desire to is get things done. But I find myself drained of life, when I’m not constantly being interrupted by it. (By the way, three weeks ago we actually did welcome a new puppy into our home. Her name is Starling and she’s made me every bit as unproductive as I anticipated she would).
So it was with the utmost respect that I suggested to my daughter, just the other day, that she do nothing. Unfortunately, it made her furious. I want to tell you about our argument because I actually think that, in the end, what we were doing was falling into the greatest philosophical rabbit hole of all time. As such, it’s something worth speaking about with care.
Why We Fought About Nothing
Although she adamantly wants to deny it, and remain enshrined in the world of eternal youth, my kid is getting older. Several years ago, most of her games were pantomimes of adult life. She would imitate the things we considered work, as a gesture of admiration and respect that also succeeded in making a total mockery of them. Our world was enchanting to her, and it was easy to protect her from outside influence because she trusted our judgement. She was enchanted by it.
Now, the change is starting. I know that it only gets more pronounced from here. She’s six, and about to finish first grade. The world of other kids is becoming more enchanting than the world of adults. It’s full of more risk, fear, and intimidation to be sure. But, under the influence of childhood, the inevitable questions about our adult judgement are beginning to emerge. Advertisers and data miners know this, and they know that in order to tap into the attention of young children, their best bet is to use other children as a portal. Her friends want to know why she doesn’t play Roblox. When they come over for playdates, they try to convince her to get access to my phone or my iPad. So it is that the attention economy has begun to sink its teeth into my daughter.
I try to fight the influence, of course. So it was that, the other day, when she begged to access one of her beloved apps on my iPad I suggested that she find something else to do instead. Indignant, she demanded that I make a creative suggestion about what she should do instead. I told her (in what I intended to be a complimentary fashion) that she was excellent at doing nothing, and I was confident she could amuse herself.
“I never do nothing!,” she informed me, with a look of betrayal and disgust.
“Of course you do,” I said. “Nothing can be exciting! Playing can be nothing.” It’s certainly what playing feels like, to me. To which she replied, with even more indignation, that playing is playing.
I suppose she was afraid that I wanted her to be bored. I suppose my suggestion that she do nothing felt like a call to lay prone on the ground and stare at the ceiling. To cease all movement. To close her eyes and shut off her senses. To stop thinking. This, of course, was not what I had in mind (though I wouldn’t have objected, had she chosen to do so!)
We ended up having a long conversation about nothing. Which, in the end, was really just me doing apologetics for nothing, trying to convince her that nothing is a perfectly pleasant thing to do. The closest I got to making her a convert for nothingness was to talk about mind-wandering. She was willing to concede that mind-wandering is, for all intents and purposes, apparently unproductive: a “waste of time” as some might put it. Mind-wandering doesn’t necessarily lead anywhere, or do anything. And yet, still, it feels like an essential thing to do. It’s one of the things that makes our minds work, that makes life tolerable, and that feeds us new ideas and inspiration. But she insisted that I let mind-wandering be mind-wandering. “It’s not nothing,” she insisted. “It’s mind-wandering.” She wanted it to be something, rather than nothing. And she was determined to reject my proposal that it can be better to do nothing than it can be to do something.
She’s trying to figure out how to enter the world. And she’s curious about how she’s being called by it, or into it. She wants to experiment with the many somethings that are being asked of her, by powers beyond her perception. I’ve been in that world long enough to be exhausted by the somethings that are constantly demanded of me. I want to hide from that world, and protect my time from it. I want learn how to tell that world that I’m doing nothing, so it will leave me alone.
Children of Nothing
There are also a thousand layers of culture between me and my child, on this point. I understand where she’s coming from. From where she stands, nothing is negative and, as such, it’s undesirable. Negative is bad, and positive is good. But I have been taught—for most of my adult life—that the negative is full of possibility and should not be dismissed. I am a child of nothing, you could say, and am predisposed to feel good about nothing.
More specifically I am a child of the 1990s, raised on grunge and post-punk aesthetics. As an undergraduate, I drank up existential philosophy and deconstruction like it was chocolate milk. Odds are that, if you’re reading this, you probably experienced something similar. Why else would you bother to spend time with someone like me? You, like me, were probably inoculated against the adverse effects of nothingness at a fairly young age, coming to see the negative—instead—as something exciting, provocative, and counter-cultural.
I’ve probably taken my affection for the negative further than most people, to be fair. My research, for instance, has basically just been a ritualistic meditation on nothingness and its many names (death, for instance). I was drawn to study theology not because I believed in God, but because I was curious to understand how people could make so much of nothing at all. And I was drawn to work with my mentor, Catherine Keller, because of her book The Face of the Deep, which was a profound and complex reversal of the theory that God created out of nothing (ex nihilo)—a reversal that insisted, instead, that God created ex profundis, or out of everything. Catherine didn’t convince me to become disinterested in nothing, but she certainly did assure me that whatever we call nothing is always more complex and mysterious than we might assume. The negative, and the empty, is the heart of mysticisms everywhere.
Nothing, to me, has always felt like a beautiful and well-kept secret.
So it did, I will admit, feel odd to me when I realized that my own child was so incredibly nothing-averse. It never surprises me, in the classroom, when my students declare that they would rather imagine hell as a site of eternal torture and punishment than as nothingness. That, in essence, they prefer an eternity of torture to nothingness because at least it’s something. I realize that not everyone is a child of nothing, that some people have been raised to think of nothingness as the worst possible evil. But my child: shouldn’t she be genetically predisposed to value nothing?
We Need to Talk About Nothing
On some level what my daughter and I were arguing about was a matter of simple semantics. There’s a form of indetermination—a sense of possibility that’s latent and not yet made—that goes by many names. The most common names for this indeterminacy are something, and nothing. These are just different names for the same sort of indeterminacy, perhaps. But how we name things matters. To call this indeterminacy something is to take on a giving posture, an agreeable posture. It’s to admit that there’s a thing there that can be had, or made, or shared. To call it nothing is to signal your resistance, to signal that you’re not going to give away your stake in this indeterminacy too easily.
Nothing is ever just nothing. Nothing is never self-evident or obvious. Even Jenny Odell’s book on doing nothing signals this unexpected dimension of nothingness quite clearly: it’s covered with beautiful flowers. Because she wants you to remember that the attention economy doesn’t want you to sit in a garden and smell roses. But you can still choose to do that—what most of us would call nothing. A book about doing nothing that’s covered with flowers sends a clear signal that you’re not trying to convince people to desire annihilation. Or to lay prone on the floor and stare at the ceiling. And yet the face of a flower, like the opaque and curious eyes of a dog, can be one of the greatest injunctions to do nothing. To become like a ripple in the passing flow of time.
Some people need a lot of convincing, before they will agree to do nothing. And perhaps some people will never agree to do nothing, in the first place, even if we might call what they’re doing nothing, anyhow. And with that, playing with the semantics of indeterminacy, we fall into the rabbit hole.
This is why we have to talk about nothing. Sure, perhaps the question of whether I want to do something or nothing is just a semantic issue—it’s just a choice that I need to make, about how to describe what’s indeterminate, or only just potential. But there are political effects for the names that we choose to use. There are political effects—protective effects—in the declaration that we plan to do nothing. It may not make much of a difference to me, personally, if I choose to call indeterminate possibility nothing rather than something. But it can make a difference if we, in community, decide to do this. So, even though I’ve told you before that I don’t like apologetics, I guess I’m going to keep talking about nothing with my daughter. Perhaps one of these days, after one of these talks (as she dresses up in costumes with nowhere to go, or sings songs that no one will hear) she will change her mind about nothing, too.