This Year, Resolve to Do Less
New year, same you, same world filled with problems. Take it easy, why don’t you?
When the pandemic began, many people took to the internet to share all the things they hoped they’d accomplish in isolation.
“I’m going to write a memoir!” one friend of mine announced.
“I’ll finally have time to work out every day!” another declared.
“Look at all this bread I baked!” said several others.
Across the internet, some people even turned their goal-setting into a cudgel with which to beat others: “I read four books this week and practiced my Spanish every day,” they tweeted. “What’s your excuse?”
When in a state of shock, it’s pretty common to retreat into work. Lonesome and powerless, many of us frantically grasped for a sense of purpose and agency. And in our moralistic culture where suffering is equated with virtue, it’s no wonder a lot of folks wanted to cast a horrifying situation as somehow “worth it.”
In those early days, I fell into a work wormhole, too — developing workshops for newly online teachers, churning out essays about how quarantine might affect each of us psychologically, organizing political calls to action. I wanted to work my way out of despair.
