The Anxiety of Doing Nothing

(The following few statements are adapted from the movie Eat, Pray, Love.)

“You feel guilty because you are American. You don’t know how to enjoy yourself!” he exclaims to Elizabeth, to which she replies, “I beg your pardon?”

“We call it ‘dolce far niente’. It means the sweetness of doing nothing – we are masters of it,” another gentleman, his face half-shaven, explains from under his barber’s hand. 

“Dolce far niente,” Julia Roberts repeats in her 2010 film, Eat, Pray, Love, where she discovers a different take on life while indulging in many delicacies during her time in Italy. Despite how lovely it sounded, however, I couldn’t find it in myself to fully resonate with this statement – it felt slightly out of touch and, honestly, out of reach. Sweetness? More like the anxiety of doing nothing. I couldn’t shake the revelation that I’ve been trapped in a certain mindset for the majority of my life.

It’s a way of thinking that has been ingrained in most people in this country since our first days of school – we are educated to work. We work to survive and to harness the tumultuous tides of capitalism, hoping to emerge as a victor. Being raised in a country which perpetuates this type of hustle culture, we are sold the idea that our productivity determines our value. When you have something to offer, you’re valuable. You can only reward yourself when you’ve achieved something and so on. 

I am reminded of a post I came across several years ago about the relentless cycle of the typical American “worker bee,” who, after a certain period of time, painstakingly heads to work, motivated solely by a mere two days that loom in the distance like the golden light at the end of a harrowing tunnel. It’s funny how the things we eventually cherish most are those which must be earned; it’s something that brought on bouts of restlessness I would often feel while sitting idly when, instead, I could have been thinking like an Italian.

In places like Italy, there seems to be an unspoken idyllic bliss, a unanimous belief that prioritizes an effortlessly glorious quality of life, one where people are slightly less obsessed with climbing the corporate ladder; although this means many of them might not share the same luxuries as us, they seem at peace. They take time to soak in the beauty of the present moment and to essentially “stop and smell the roses”.

So, why not do the same for a change? Why not live like an Italian and also enjoy the finer, slower things we often overlook while trying to satisfy a hunger that will probably never be fully fed? 

Why not truly embody dolce far niente and give it the same importance we give our professional lives?

Just a thought.

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