Doing Nothing

Doing Nothing is a book about doing nothing in a system where there is always something pressing that ought to be done. Not the productive unstructured time of self-help books, but the aimless and ineffective doing nothing of procrastination, resignation, and melancholia. James Currie pursues these themes across a wide terrain of experiences, materials, and examples from the personal, local, and anecdotal, through to the existential, cosmological, and apocalyptic--reflecting, among other things, on the COVID pandemic, the lives of teenagers, Lars Van Trier's 2011 film Melancholia, work, play, and politics. Doing Nothing offers a lived-in embrace of states of being that stand against liveliness and the mournful feelings of entrapment and shame that exist alongside the unexpected opportunities such situations afford.