Doing nothing, just glancing at the horizon while the waves of the sea beat. Lose your gaze among the high mountains. Or lie in a hammock and let yourself be rocked by its movement. These are theoretically pleasurable activities, but they can be stressful for some people.
Those who have what psychologist Rafael Santandreu calls ociophobia (the art of doing nothing). “There are people who are afraid, panicky about the fact of being unoccupied. They become anxious. They would much rather be busy all day long. There are also those who are psychologically unwell, who don’t want to stop because then they have more time to eat their brains, to make themselves more miserable. There is the fear of stopping and finding your own mental disaster,” explains the author of the book The art of not bitter life.
These may be more extreme cases, but the truth is that “for the modern adult it is much more difficult to do nothing than to have a busy schedule,” says Santandreu. What on vacation can be translated as an endless number of activities to fill the free time, to the point of arriving at the end of the summer with almost more stress than when we started.
“With the inertia we carry around with us, it’s harder to slow down, stop and do nothing, compared to continuing with the usual routine of working. Also, in part, because I suppose we feel that we are useful that way, that we are not wasting time, that that is the key and the trap,” Azahara Alonso adds. In her latest book, Gozo, a hybrid of novel and essay, the writer defends laziness and the pleasure of doing nothing.
Azahara also addresses a feeling that can arise in those moments of leisure: guilt. “I really like to distinguish between doing absolutely nothing, which is very difficult, or doing what we feel like doing. Which is also different from what is expected of us. In either of those two cases, there is indeed guilt, which has become systemic. We are not producing, we are not complying with the mandates that are there,” explains Alonso, who is also a philosopher.
Alonso assures that guilt is not felt when sightseeing because one is “filling the time” with different activities, which is what a person is expected to do. And he refers to a reflection by photographer Susan Sontag. “She says that the traditionally more hard-working societies are the ones that at first, when they did tourism, took more photos, because they put the camera between the world and themselves, to exercise something, otherwise it seemed that they were not doing anything and that the trip had no sense,” she relates.
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