THE BENEFITS OF DOING NOTHING
For decades, overstimulation and abundance in many
areas of life in the Western world have developed
from a welcome richness into a pesky evil. We are
constantly fed new information and overwhelmed
with more work and more distraction.
With backgrounds in neuroscience, art and new
media, as well as leadership development, integral
health and coaching, two oddballs from Austria,
Herwig Kopp and Norbert Trompeter, have been
pouring their creative energy into the art of idleness.
When we do more and more we do in fact feel more
ADN.
They claim that the antidote to the rat race is: doing
nothing, but constructively. By ‘doing nothing’, they
mean a shift from outer activities to inner ones.
By inner actions, they mean aiming for seemingly
purposeless actions like watching the clouds, listening
may be reaching our targets, but at what cost?
inevitable for us to become less productive and not so
we won’t have the time to recharge our batteries.
and being aware of what is going on in your mind.
The trick is not holding onto any thoughts tightly,
but instead letting it all pass you by. And of course,
activities such as reading a newspaper or book,
What can we do if we have no time for anything
anymore?
count as purely inner activities, in their opinion.
“Abundance is leading us to our limits,” say Herwig
Kopp and Norbert Trompeter, the founders of the
In August 2013, Kopp and Trompeter conducted a selfexperiment in which they did nothing for a quarter of
their workday. Their hypothesis was that this would
inspire people and make them more relaxed, focused
point out that we have known the rules of scarcity for
thousands of years, but, as a society, we haven’t yet
learned how to deal with abundance.
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