Doing Nothing
Crumb nails it, as usual.
HOBOKEN, NOVEMBER 10, 2025. A friend texts: “Are you busy?” It’s an innocent question, she just wants to know if I can chat, probably about an assignment for her food-writing class.
But I almost text back, No, I’m not fucking busy! Her question feels like an accusation, it twangs my guilt strings, because far from being “busy,” I’m doing nothing.
To be more precise, I’m sitting on my couch, legs outstretched, facing the sliding glass doors of my living room, looking at the rectangular isthmus of Pier A and the rippling Hudson and beyond that the Freedom Tower, spire piercing pearly clouds. I have a notebook on my lap, a pen in my right hand.
Now, because of my friend’s text, I’m thinking about doing nothing, but that hardly counts as “busy.” Is writing about doing nothing better than doing nothing? I doubt it. At best, to paraphrase Toy Story’s Woody, I’m doing nothing with style.
Meanwhile, others are busy trying to make the world a better place. Claudia, a veteran journalist, is trying to raise money for those who can’t get food stamps because of the government shutdown. She’s auctioning signed autobiographies of famous folks she’s interviewed and giving the proceeds to a food bank.
Madhusree is nursing her ailing mother in Kolkata. She’s also working on a book about how India’s mining industry, a synecdoche for global capitalism, is crushing indigenous people who have the ill fortune to dwell in lands rich in bauxite.
Alex, I’m guessing, is jotting down notes for a presentation on whether recent events have increased the risk of nuclear war between, say, the U.S. and China.
At this moment, thousands of couples on every continent—even Antarctica, I bet--are striving to perpetuate the species. That is, fucking. Moms and dads are also feeding their kids and educating them by, say, going to the American Museum of Natural History to see T-rex.
My friend, the one who texted me, is writing about food, which like fucking gives us pleasure and sustains us. Mamdani and his advisors are plotting how to fulfill his campaign promise to take from the rich and give to the poor. Good luck, man!
I’m not doing anything so admirable, so good. The best that can be said is that I’m not doing anything bad. I’m not blowing up boats. I’m not trying to make it harder for the poor to get food and health care.
Now, in my defense, some sages advocate sitting on your ass. Crumb points this out in Despair Comix. A strip on the horrors of modern life ends with a drawing of a naked dude sitting under a tree. Crumb’s caption says: “The best answer anybody has come up with yet for all our problems is just to sit and do nothing…”
Real funny. And what’s the point of staying busy when nothingness looms? When sooner or later, via nuclear apocalypse or engineered bioweapons or heat death, we’ll sink back into the oblivion whence we came? Archibald MacLeish dramatizes our plight in his sonnet “The End of the World.” An excerpt:
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his first and second toe
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman…
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:
And there, there overhead… hung over
Those thousands of white faces… the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all.
Robinson Jeffers strains to get us to see oblivion in a positive light in “Night”. The poem ends:
A few centuries
Gone by, was none dared not to people
The darkness beyond the stars with harps and habitations.
But now, dear is the truth. Life is grown sweeter, and lonelier,
And death is no evil.
“Night” once comforted me, but now it strikes me as whistling past the graveyard, if not as a misanthrope’s hope. Jeffers could be sneakily suggesting, Maybe nothing is better than this something.
During a drug trip I oscillated between two visions of nothing. At one point I saw, I knew, that once there is something, there can never be nothing. And I understood something to mean mind, without which there might as well be nothing. Something keeps changing, sure, but it never vanishes for good, it can’t, something is eternally conserved, I mean, that’s just physics.
Then I saw, I knew, that my previous vision was false, a vain hope, a product of my wishful thinking. Neither this universe, nor life, nor we had to be. We are a fluke within a fluke within a fluke. Our destiny is nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all.
And the irony is that we’re doing our best to fulfill that destiny while we keep fucking like maniacs to perpetuate the species. Hilarious. It’s the old clash between Thanatos and Eros, and the odds tip toward Thanatos.
I try to talk myself out of my cosmic pessimism. I tell myself we’re fundamentally rational and decent, we have free will, we’ll surely find a way to avoid destroying ourselves. I write columns with this upbeat theme, to give myself, if no one else, hope.
But I keep lapsing back into this default state: sitting on my ass, doing nothing, Sometimes I pretend I’m meditating, grokking the mysterium tremendum, the weirdness. Life is a miracle! I chant my mantra: D’oh.
But lately it’s been hard to sustain the illusion that I’m meditating. I’ve come to see doing nothing, sitting on my couch staring out the window, as a kind of preparation, a dress rehearsal, for the eternity of nothing that awaits us.
I text my friend back, Nope, not busy. You?
Further Reading:
Entropy, Meaninglessness and Miracles