The nothing deception

Jake Goldbas

Staff Columnist

Published: Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Updated: Wednesday, May 20, 2009

The summer is a time of leisure and sometimes boredom, and students generally wonder what doing all that nothing is supposed to do.

The May 11, 2009 issue of the New Yorker has a “reflections” article by Adam Gopnik which outlines a theory of invention based on leisure time. He writes, “Frivolity is the mother of invention,” from reasoning that it is when a problem is solved that actual new and interesting innovations occur. He uses basic examples that he had handy, such as his collection of shaving razors through time and peacocks’ feathered tails.

Surprisingly, Gopnik did not mention Jared Diamond’s theory from his book Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond says something remarkably similar: inventions’ uses many times came after the invention was made. In this way, Diamond says “Invention is the mother of necessity,” as opposed to the other way around.

Diamond also says that invention can never take place without leisure time to invent with. It makes sense that if you are too busy farming, you cannot invent a tractor.

So there is your positive argument for having nothing to do. You can get so many ideas from YouTube, Wikipedia, television, and the movies. Hopefully there’s some other stuff you are doing like making money, being outside, talking to friends and living life.

If you like your studies and the major you are in, maybe you can pursue those topics as well. There should be clear positive benefits to all of these things, and I am not entirely sure that moderation is always the best moral to the story. It can be beneficial to just do what you like as much as possible.

Perhaps it can be as beneficial as doing what you slowly reason out to do. One should be able to align long term pleasure and short term pleasure at least generally. In fact, this world would be terrible if everyone lived in opposite land where our inventions and boredoms could not be answered.

There is a lot of good to come from slowing down and thinking a little bit, or even not thinking at all. This is the parallel and opposite argument to the one that we hear, say, and hopefully do during the school year. You know, the one about working hard and saving vacation stuffs for vacationing.

I cannot help but feel like, with the encroachment of free time into work during college (since when did Friday become an actual part of the weekend?) we are in the middle of something similar in the summer.

Now vacations for me seem more like work without long term benefit, like school minus the fun of learning. But there is a very important difference between good nothing and bad nothing, and its intuitive.

It should not be an unpaid terrible job any more than it should be a whole lot of drinking and partying. Generally speaking, we all know the difference between production and the lack thereof, we simply have to be aware of the difference.

Send Jake your thoughts on the summer to letters@technicianonline.com.

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