Of the myriad potential things I could be doing at any one time, my ultimate number one favourite is still “as little as possible”. I did a great bit of nothing the other day: I spent 20 minutes taking laundry up to the washing machine because there were too many socks and I had to do two trips, so I sort of laid down on the bed for a bit in between and stared at the ceiling. I realise doing this is very “dude, maybe you have ME”, or “we really shouldn’t have ignored the warning signs before Joel died of inactivity,” but it was close to cathartic. Life is busy, man. Sometimes you need to stop and look around. Sometimes you need to pause halfway through changing a duvet cover when it all gets a bit much.
I’m happy, then, that explosive mint brand Mentos has finally stepped up to the plate and commissioned a weird survey saying Britons really like cancelling their social plans and doing nothing instead. How is this related to mints? I do not know. I do not know at all. Mentos commissioning a survey of 2,000 Brits to confirm that yes, sometimes 49% of Brits are too tired to go out and 36% “just don’t feel like it sometimes” is the start of a slippery slope. Soon, brands will have exhausted themselves of questions to ask people in a bid to make a tenuous connection to their product, so they’ll just have to resort to ever more desperate, conversations-you-have-with-a-stranger-at-a-work-party, topics of survey conversation. “Heinz Ketchup has found that 90% of Brits have noticed their hair always looks better on the day they plan to cut it”, that sort of thing. “Haribo Tangfastics confirms that one in 10 Brits have a drawer full of carrier bags in their kitchen but literally never remember to take one of them with them to the shops, so the collection just grows ever larger, ever more powerful.”
But the point still stands: doing things is awful, doing nothing is a vivid dream, and cancelling plans – as comic John Mulaney once said – is akin to heroin in terms of instant relief. This is almost certainly different for vile teens versus tired, jaded adults. I remember having hopes and dreams, and being clinically afraid of being labelled, as I overheard someone described at a party, as “flaky”. But then I had a transcendental weekend in my pants and a dressing gown watching two entire seasons of Seinfeld, and fell in love with cancelling plans. It was then I realised it’s crazy that we’ve built a society where doing things is deemed so acceptable, but there is no flipside to the coin. That we still have to bluff and say things like, “oh, I’m just tired” or “I have to wait for the Ocado man, he is over a day and a half late”, or “I forgot that I had a thing … my sister, you know. You know how she is. So anyway I have to do that thing, instead.”
I think we should embrace our base, human desire to cancel plans to meet down the pub and instead go home and eat a big share-sized Dairy Milk and read, but not participate in, a large WhatsApp group message. Sack off that distant acquaintance’s wedding to stay at home and watch Come Dine With Me marathons in stunned silence. Snub baptisms to try to get good at a free bowling app on the iPad. In a world where things keep happening – relentlessly, the things, the things never-ending – it should be more OK to say “actually, I’d rather just … just not. No alternative. Just: not.” We should be unafraid to tell our friends, “I like you, but not as much as I like doing nothing.” Step free from the oppression of doing things, Britain. Make up some excuse and sack it off.
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