#8: Americans Suck At Doing Nothing

You might think managing your days is immune from stress - it isn't

Leaving a career is like your first day away at college.

For the first time in a very long time, there is no one to get you out of bed in the morning – and no immediate consequences if you choose not to do so.

There is no call to your parents tattling that you weren’t in class. There is no email from an irate boss about missing a meeting. There’s only you, the passage of time and what you choose to do each day.

This can wreck some people, especially Americans. Americans suck at doing nothing.

We are taught to hustle, to get ahead, to be ever more productive. Work provides a path to achieve, and while many of us complain about work pressures, we also define ourselves by what we do to make money.

Also? Work provides structure, a rhythm to each week. Without it, many people struggle. It’s counterintuitive, really. You finally reach a point where you can choose what to do each day, and in some ways it feels like *more* stress, not less.

Studies show that nearly half of U.S. workers don’t even take the paid time off they are entitled to from employers, and 60% of U.S. adults report they feel like they are too busy to fully enjoy life.

In fact, most Americans derive at least some meaning from their jobs – a third of them report “a great deal of meaning” from work. It’s how many of us define ourselves.

A 2021 article in The New Republic about Americans struggling to be productive while locked down at home during COVID noted, “Our contemporary practices of glorifying productivity—our do-what-you-love ethos, the flood of self-help writing aimed at creating the appearance and the performance of never-ending work—shame idleness, attach a sort of divine purity to hustle, and raise questions about what leisure even is and who deserves it.”

Social media has made it worse, with post after post urging us all to launch side hustles and often unprovable tales of those who struck it rich while doing so.

Retirement planning guides are replete with warnings of how hard it can be for some to transition from work that gives them identity to post-work. When you step away from your career in America, to a new chapter that is usually represented as doing nothing, who are you?

I knew this challenge was coming. Besides reading about it in countless articles and books, I had never been good at “do nothing” vacations. In our family, for many years our vacations took the form of exploring new places inside and outside our state, visiting historical sites and museums and touring other countries.

And I tried not to allow my career to be my identity. Yes, I loved what I did, but I had a family, adopted pets and other interests. What I didn’t have was a lot of free time.

And yet, it’s not easy to do less. Which is why the first thing many people do when they leave a career is … find more things to do. The upside is, often those new activities are things you want to do vs. have to do.

Still, it’s hard to let go. Which is how I found Phyl Terry, Never Search Alone and my 8 months as part of a Job Search Council. That’s next.