Do Less.

My year of magical not-thinking

On my left ribs, I have a too-big tattoo of text from my favorite book, Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut: “busy, busy, busy.” In the book, the quote continues: “... is what … we whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.” The lesson is: Don’t be so sure you know how any of this works.

At the auspicious age of 42, life keeps surprising me by revealing that my most basic beliefs are wrong. Like: distance = rate x time. It turns out that more time doing does not necessarily lead to better results.

I’ve slowly gotten better at recognizing this faulty logic in certain domains, but the pattern repeats across time scales and activities. More isn’t more. More is actually less.

When I went on sabbatical toward the end of last year, I was excited by the prospect of finally getting time to “work on myself.” Writing a lot alongside an intense job had left little time for anything else in 2025, and as a result I had a sense that I was failing to progress in some critical dimension. At long last, I would have the chance to catch up to the person I wanted to be!

I’d been running a longform reading debt all year, so I set about attacking it. Audiobooks on 2x speed. Two books a week. Podcasts crammed into the gaps. I downloaded one of those speed-reading apps that shows you a blur of individual words to plow through my Substack backlog.

It sort of worked, in the sense that the pile got shorter, and the scratchy strain of looking at certain folders on my computer diminished. But behind it I had a nagging sense that I wasn’t actually getting anywhere. There are always more books. The list refills twice as fast as I can empty it. And I wasn’t absorbing a whole lot of what I was reading — I’d finish a book and, a week later, struggle to articulate what it was about beyond a sentence or two. I was processing so many words per week — how could it be that I was hardly learning anything at all?

Slowly, I realized I was working with the wrong mental metaphor. I’d been treating my brain like a hard drive: Transfer the file, and it’s there. But that’s not how it works at all, not even close. Learning is more like digestion. You don’t absorb more nutrition by eating faster. Past a certain rate, you just stop digesting, and the food you’re cramming in isn’t feeding you, it’s just passing through. The real nutritive work — the part that actually makes you stronger — happens after you stop eating, over hours, invisibly. And you can’t speed it up by eating more.

Ideas work the same way. They have to be broken down, recombined with things you already know, connected to something you’ve experienced. That process runs on downtime — walks, showers, sleep, staring out windows. Cramming more in doesn’t help. It’s eating another meal before you’ve digested the last one.

I think I can count on two hands the number of important ideas I’ve discovered via podcasts, spread across hundreds of hours of listening. The ROI is terrible. Meanwhile, when I’m short on ideas for posts, the thing that always works is a hot yoga class. Ninety minutes in a room with no phone. I can’t stop myself from having ideas in that environment, and not being able to write them down means I’m automatically selecting for the two or three good enough to remember afterward. The rest evaporate, which is fine — distance gives you perspective on which ideas are worth keeping.

The bottleneck, it turns out, was never how fast I could take in information. It was always how much time I gave myself to do something with it.

But, the pattern repeats: Discovering this doesn’t mean I’ve internalized it. I keep finding new areas of my life where the pressure to optimize is sabotaging the thing I'm attempting to improve.

I recently did a week-long meditation retreat with Jhourney, which teaches meditation novices how to reach the jhanas — eight states of meditative absorption that range in quality from rapture and bliss to increasingly refined and subtle states of equanimity and pure awareness. The Jhourney method, in a nutshell: Bring an openhearted feeling — love, serenity, joy — into awareness, then progressively expand and relax into your enjoyment until the experience loops on itself (enjoyment becomes enjoying the enjoyment becomes …) and you experience an emotional phase change, the “opposite of a panic attack.”

Part of Jhourney’s pedagogy is the idea that “you don’t know how to relax,” but I was pretty sure I did. I’d lie down, carefully scan my body-mind for any instance of tension, and release it. Welcome errant thoughts, let them go. Run a little shutdown sequence in my brain until everything was quiet.

I did this for six days and, while I had a wonderful and transformative time for other reasons, I didn’t achieve jhana on the retreat.

Jhourney advises you to choose a “scaffold” — a reliably pleasant experience that invokes the openhearted feeling you’re trying to use as a flint for the first jhana. I chose giving my cat, Nixie, a belly rub, because it so consistently makes me happy. At the retreat, I’d sink into that feeling, and sometimes it would throw off sparks, but no fire.

I properly gave up for the last 24 hours of the retreat and stayed in my room binge-reading a book (Ra by QNTM, I recommend). I was happy, when we finally came home, to flop on my bed with the real Nixie as she, purring, practically turned herself inside out looking for the position of maximum belly-exposure. After 10 minutes of that, my attention started to turn back toward finishing my book, but I thought, no, this is nice just the way it is — and slipped into the first jhana.

In retrospect, what went wrong at the retreat was the same thing that went wrong with my reading binge, it was just the pattern repeating at a deeper level. The part of me doing the scanning and releasing — the monitoring layer, the internal project manager — was the thing that actually needed to go offline. Rather than relaxing in the relevant sense, I was using my optimization machinery to simulate relaxation at a very convincing level of fidelity while the machinery itself hummed along at full speed.

When I did finally relax, it was less like “going in the same direction, but farther,” the way I’d been imagining it, and more like moving along a different axis entirely, perpendicular to the one I knew about. Like discovering a new spatial dimension by executing some incomprehensible maneuver that you can only describe as a “turn, but different.” From an optimizer’s lens, the benefits of shutting off the optimization machine are literally inconceivable.

And if your optimizing machine is still humming along, even if you are doing rest-like activities, you are not truly resting. Reading The Power Broker in your spare time, not because you are genuinely interested, but because you can’t bear to be the only person at your SF dinner party who hasn’t? Still optimizing. Cooking the most impressive dinner possible for your friends, so you can convince them that you’re worthy of love, rather than making something you enjoy producing? Still optimizing.

Restful activities are atelic: not primarily directed towards a telos, an end goal. That is a fundamentally different relationship with experience. It affects your perception of time (less accurately tracked) and space (broader, more inclusive). If you are trying to make rest happen, then you ruin all of its benefits: sanity, inspiration, wholeness.

If you’re crazy like me, it’s easy to fall into a cycle: notice that rest has positive outputs. Attempt to increase the positive yield. Then, without noticing, fuck up the rest by trying to optimize it, and wonder why life feels so bad, even though you’re taking care of yourself so well.

This is why my 2026 motto is “Do Less.” This is an odd resolution for someone who wrote You Can Just Do Things, a book that is more or less a 54,000-word argument for doing more. But, to be fair to myself, the book does contain the following passage:

There is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, that contains the wonderful concept of an anti-book — the idea that every book has a mirror-image volume, with the opposite contents of the original.

What would be the anti-book of this book?

This book is a very yang book, in the Daoist framework of yin/yang. The strategies generally involve doing more — taking on problems yourself, relentlessly trialing solutions, and finding shortcuts to achieve your goals faster. Throughout this book, there is a sense of pushing past constraints and breaking through conventions. This is a product of how being action-oriented has personally helped me.

One could imagine a yin book about agency, called Don’t Just Do Things. It would include topics like: how to attend to the system you’re a part of rather than pursuing your individual agenda, how to be patient until an intuitive solution arises naturally, and how to submit gracefully to the existing forces of change in your life rather than pushing, pushing, pushing. The book’s message would be that the search for an optimal choice, for better, sometimes causes us to foolishly overlook the possibility of skilfully, gently flowing with the momentum of what is already going to happen, of being receptive to our current character rather than trying to change it.

If you’re reading this book because it flatters the way you already are — action-driven, hyper-ambitious, hell-bent on optimizing — perhaps Don’t Just Do Things is the book that would actually help you most. If you’re a high-achieving person, as you proceed, ask yourself, would it actually be more revolutionary for me to flip this advice the other way around? See if that is what really provokes the existential cringe. If so, that’s probably where freedom lies.

Time for me to take my own advice.

Thank you to my handsome husband Sasha for the “atelic” framing. Sign up to be notified when our book, You Can Just Do Things, is available for purchase.