The benefits of wasting time

A little aimlessness and solitude aren't only good for the soul, they're essential for wellbeing, says physicist and author Alan Lightman. 

In his new book, In Praise of Wasting Time, Lightman makes the case that humans have become slaves to productivity at the price of creativity.

Alan Lightman tells Afternoons' Jesse Mulligan that he started to feel our relationship with time was going wrong back in the mid-90s when cell phones and the internet became a large part of most people’s days. 

“It seemed like people were just whittling down the day into just smaller and smaller units of efficient time use, and of course all that is coupled with the increasing pace of life.”

The creativity of children - as measured by the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking - has diminished since about the mid-1990s and continues diminishing, researchers have noted.

Psychologists and sociologists believe that higher rates of depression and anxiety among teenagers are closely related to the internet and the pace of life. 

“The fear of missing out - there’s actually an acronym for that … Young people now with their smartphones and with the rapid pace of life are always able to check and see what their friends are doing on Instagram, on Snapchat, Facebook, and they’re always comparing themselves to the accomplishments and purchases of their friends.”

“Young people … they’re used to being connected with the grid all of the time and they’re afraid that they can’t disconnect, they feel anxious when they disconnect."

Lightman refers to a Harvard University study testing whether young people could sit in a room by themselves for 10 minutes without any external stimulation. 

“I think about 300 college students did the experiment, were put in this room and sat in a chair by themselves. They weren’t allowed to bring any watches or smartphones or any devices with them so they didn’t really know how much time had passed. 

“The only thing in the room was a table with a buzzer on it and if you pressed the buzzer you would get an unpleasant electric shock. They found that over 50 percent of the boys and over 30 percent of the girls pressed the buzzer because they would rather have an unpleasant stimulation than no external stimulation at all.”

Lightman once visited a Cambodian village where about 700 people living on subsistence farming - no electricity, no plumbing - and every day several women cycled to the highway about 16 kilometres away to buy produce. 

“I asked one of the women how long the trip took, the trip she makes every day, and she got this puzzled look on her face and says ‘I never thought about that’. 

“I was just totally startled and knocked over by that reply and realised that their relationship with time was totally different from mine.” 

It is always possible to build in short periods of quiet reflection during a day, Lightman says.

“We talk about ‘wasting’ time but really I just mean … spending time without a goal, without a directed activity. Letting your mind wander and think about what it wants to think about ...That is so important for our creativity, for our sense of self and the exploration who we are and what our values are and what’s important to us and just replenishment of our minds. 

“The astounding thing is that many creative people find that they get their best ideas when they’re in that kind of state, when they’re just letting their minds roam.

“When the mind is resting, when you’re not consciously thinking of anything, there’s a term for that which is called the default mode - that’s when you’re not trying to solve any problem. 

“That is a state of the brain often when people are most creative."

Lightman cites composer Gustav Mahler who took walks in the countryside, writer Gertrude Stein who drove in the country to look at cows, and Albert Einstein who spoke about letting the mind spin freely.

It's ideal to build this downtime into the workday, he says.

“I would have a quiet room in every company in the building where employees were encouraged to go for … 30 minutes during the day. Digital devices would not be allowed in the room.

“This would not be part of the lunch hour, this would be a separate 30 minutes where employers were just encouraged to just go and be quiet - some might choose to meditate, some might choose to read a book, some might choose to just sit there quietly.” 

A number of companies have instituted meditation facilities in their building, and found that productivity increased, he says. 

“I have a high school friend who had a practice of ringing a bell at the beginning of each class and asking all of her students to be quiet for four minutes after hearing the bell ring. She found that the productivity of the students increased considerably.” 

The lack of quiet time in our daily lives is actively damaging us, in a similar way to global warming, Lightman says.

“I think we are damaging our psychological self and our inner selves … that part of us that imagines, that explores, that thinks about who we are and what we are and where we’re going and what our values are. 

“If we continue on the trend of just living faster and faster lives plugged in 24/7 to the grid then we are becoming robotic.

“It’s a subtle thing. With global warming, the damage is physical and you can see it and you can easily measure it. 

“The damage we’re talking about now is damage to the psychological self from being plugged in all the time, from requiring psychological stimulation all the time. That damage is more subtle.

“It is losing our inner selves, in a sense, and I don’t want the world to turn into a species of robots, just mindlessly connecting all of the time and rushing around all of the time.”