the importance of sitting around

Nietzsche is famous for saying “if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back at you.” Although the message is cryptic, the quote has nevertheless made it into the public sphere and I doubt that this piece here marks someone’s first encounter with it. I’m also convinced that a relatively well-read person is capable of inferring their own meaning without further context. I’m curious to know how people understand it, but to stay close to home, I’ll list two possible interpretations of the full sentence, which goes, “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

First interpretation: If you spend enough time contemplating the void (immaterial), you will eventually grasp it.

Second interpretation: If you spend enough time contemplating the void (immaterial), you will eventually become one with the void (contribute no material to the real world).

There’s actually so much more to say about Nietzsche’s thinking here, but I haven’t looked much into it, and it's not really necessary here. I should also say that both these interpretations are just that, interpretations, and neither is right or wrong. What I’m trying to do is stage an attempt at something of a Rorschach test, also known as the inkblot test: you look at a blot of ink and your interpretation of the purely abstract image is meant to reveal something about your psyche. The quote here is my inkblot, and whether you’re a person who aligns more with one interpretation than the other, I think I can tell a few things about your worldview, which I’m pretty interested in. I know because both of them live within me. This must be obvious, since I made up these sentences myself anyway.

I think I’ve written about this before, but here’s the thing: it’s really hard for me to relate to the person I was a few years ago, say, my high school self. I used to be crazy focused, like a sharp shooter. I would set my mind to a long term goal and dissolve everything that’s not directly related to achieving that. For example, if I wanted a good grade on an exam that was a year from now, it would take a lot of convincing for me to take some time to do something else, like to go out for dinner. My rationale was that even though the ‘good time’ I was going to have socializing for a few hours wasn’t going to negatively impact my grade on that exam, it still wasn’t going to help it either. So the clear choice for me was to not go out. Even if I wasn’t doing anything productive while I stayed at home, I wouldn’t bother expending time or energy to go out of my way to casually enjoy something with no strings attached.

This was probably a very extreme mindset and I would often feel left out of things, but in theory it should make sense. Frivolity — that’s what a dinner was, and to me these didn’t have any real impact on the trajectory of my life. A dispensable activity. No doubt I developed this line of reasoning, because this really is how the world is structured. You are told that everything you do has to be productive. You have to contribute to the world somehow. You have to go through years of education and training so you can learn to efficiently contribute to the world and its economy. As long as you are young, you are capable, and in order to belong, you have to create value for the place where you belong. The way it’s set up is that being idle is the time spent you’re not creating economic value, and so you have to find ways to work around that. If a 9-5 isn’t your thing, and you want to spend your time playing video games, you should monetize your hobby — become a Twitch streamer. It literally costs you to just sit around. Whatever you do, just keep the wheels turning.

I don’t want to say I wasn’t built for this life, because, of course, as Sartre said, existence precedes essence, but I really wasn’t built for this life. Or I just didn’t want to live life like this. It makes life seem like an endless list of checkboxes. You run from one milestone to another, but to what extent? It’s not clear to me then, what this is all for. I’m not trying to make a case for the “it’s not the destination but the journey that matters” sentiment, rather all I’m doing is saying that I don’t see a point in expending on means without an end. “You just have to keep going,” but why? Everything’s always moving forward, and at quite a pace: fast fashion, fast food, fast media, and so on. Consider the art from the periods before the industrial revolution and compare them with contemporary media: there’s just barely any more TV shows or movies about people existing. The capitalistic fourth wall remains unbroken. There’s beauty in the painting by William Merritt Chase, literally titled Idle Hours. There’s just no such thing anymore. The TikTok algorithm works so well that if you don’t like the thirty second video you’re watching, you can keep scrolling to find another that is spliced together with a satisfying video — both clips running simultaneously to maintain their monopoly over your attention span.

But here’s the thing — if you don’t spend enough time sitting around, when do you think? I’m not interested in the constant inner monologue we all have running inside our head, but intentional deliberation. You need to spend time thinking about things, wondering what’s what, and try to come up with answers on your own. Otherwise, you’re just a consumer: not coming up with anything new, and taking everything you’re fed at face value. Don’t get me wrong, but sitting around is not just romanticizing your melancholic solitude. You could be around people and also be sitting around. Sure, you’re not making active contributions to the world’s economy, and you’re not even indirectly contributing to it by studying law so you can make the world a better place by charging people fortunes in legal fees to survive barriers set in place by the rich and powerful. But sitting around also means creating space to let things happen. Alright sure, nothing important happened today, or yesterday, or in the last year during the hours you spent just lounging around with friends. But I think that’s a little unfair: you can’t judge life in discrete amounts. For you to fairly evaluate anything, and that includes your life, it is necessarily preconditioned to first conclude its act.

It must understandably be very easy to misread what I’m writing, but the thing I’m not doing here is encouraging anything like whiling away your life. A few days ago I went to the Museum of Modern Art. I’ve always wanted to go to MoMA, and it really did live up to my expectations. It was like five floors of artworks and installations. They had everything from Monet to Basquiat. I wonder what the total value of all the artwork in the museum is. Is it in the millions? Or maybe billions? If you remove one piece of art from the museum, how much less special would it make the museum? Probably not much, or not at all. Now, remove another. Not much of a difference. Keep subtracting, until you’ve done away with a whole floor. Does the Museum of Modern Art become any less special? I would say no. So, when does it stop being a special museum? Maybe when it stops being special to anyone at all. What’s the line between intentionally sitting around versus whiling away your life? You’ll probably know it yourself when you’re a bum — or people will tell you.

Everything always goes on. The economy is perhaps the closest we’ll ever get to creating perpetual machines. I’ve never heard anyone complain about prices being too low. The overall trajectory is, by my guess, always up. Capitalism is doing so well in the world that the other day I saw a store selling a bag of urine marketed as an adult toy. You can buy literally anything these days.

It really is Milton Freidman’s world — don’t let him get to you.