The art of doing nothing

Quick answer: the art of doing nothing, the Italian il dolce far niente, the sweetness of doing nothing, is not laziness. It is a deliberate refusal to optimise every hour, and it may be the most underrated recovery tool a busy professional has. The Italians and the southern French built it into daily life. The hustle cultures of South Africa and America built burnout instead.

"You do not know how to enjoy life. You Americans work too hard. You get burned out... Italians don't do that. We call it il dolce far niente, the sweetness of doing nothing." - Eat Pray Love (2010)

That line, from the film adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love, lands harder now than it did in 2010. We live in a society where the double-edged sword of technology has assisted us enormously: faster communication, on-demand services and goods, and free information. However, it has also in a sense created busier lifestyles, where professionals are expected to optimise every hour of the day.

Health itself has become another task to schedule. Time for exercise and wellbeing has to be booked into a calendar between meetings, and in many developing countries even that is considered a luxury. Within this on-demand culture, we are often led to burnout and to other possible diseases, cardiovascular strain, chronic insomnia, anxiety and depression among them. The World Health Organization classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon, and in 2021 it estimated that long working hours contribute to hundreds of thousands of deaths from stroke and heart disease each year.

What the south of France taught me

Yet the Italians and the southern French know how to live the art of doing nothing. During my time abroad in the south of France, I saw it up close. When I sent emails to professors for my MBA thesis proposal edits over the weekend, the simple response was: the French don't work on weekends.

I also came to learn that the southern French take long, experiential lunches, enjoying simply the moment. They appreciate novelty in small moments, as opposed to the crisis optimism displayed in the South African and American hustle societies, where rest must be earned, justified and preferably posted about.

"I believe the art of doing nothing is not only underrated, it is desperately needed to reset, refocus, and not let life pass us by." - Alexandra Zoë Varenzakis

How fast we became

The cultural evidence is everywhere once you look. The slow food movement was founded in Italy in 1986, as a direct protest against a fast food chain opening near the Spanish Steps in Rome, a deliberate defence of the long meal against the quick one. Carl Honoré's In Praise of Slow named the condition back in 2004, calling our addiction to speed a cult. By the 2020s, burnout had its own bestsellers, quiet quitting entered the vocabulary, and whole wellness industries arose to sell back to exhausted professionals the rest their calendars took away.

France went further and legislated the boundary: since 2017, French companies with more than fifty employees have been required to respect the right to disconnect, the legal right not to answer work email outside working hours. What I received as a courteous rebuff from a professor is, in fact, written into French labour law.

Doing nothing is a skill, not an absence

This is not a romantic argument for working less well. It is a strategic argument for recovery. Attention is a depletable resource; judgement degrades under continuous load; the most creative thinking reliably arrives in idle moments, on a walk, in a shower, at a long table with no agenda. A regulated person makes better decisions than an optimised one. That is the same principle behind the window of tolerance work on this site: performance follows state.

• —Take one meal a week with no phone, no agenda and no end time
• —Protect a weekend boundary, then watch the quality of Monday improve
• —Treat idle time as input to the work, not a gap in it
• —Notice small moments deliberately, the espresso, the light, the pause before a reply
• —If nothing else, stop before the burnout does it for you

The art of doing nothing is not a retreat from ambition. It is how you sustain one. See how this philosophy shapes the coaching side of what we do on the Zoë Wisdom page, or start a conversation on the contact page.