NOTHING TO SAY #2

Nothing is… a rabbit hole

by Adam Turkington

Seven years ago I listened to a fifteen minute radio show that changed my life.

The show contained a story told by a man who’d locked himself out of his house and when the locksmith arrived to let them into their house, he did so in 2 minutes. Having done his job, the locksmith says ‘That’ll be £80 please’, and the man says ‘That was an easy £80’.

The locksmith tells him when he was learning to be a locksmith, he’d turn up and take 30 minutes to let people into their houses, maybe while they stood in the rain with their shopping, sometimes he’d even break the lock and the cost would have an additional £50 on it. When he did this NO-ONE complained. He did a shit job, but people felt he was working hard so they just paid.

Around this time I also had a coffee with a business consultant who was given to me to help me grow my newly created tourism product, (the walking tour).
‘So’ she said ‘How do you want to grow your business?’
I thought for a moment.

‘Actually, I don’t. For the first time in my whole life I have enough money to pay my bills, have a holiday and do Christmas without worrying. Why would I want to grow my business? I work too hard actually. You know what I want? I was to make the same amount of money with less work.’

The rest of the coffee didn’t go well. I never saw her again. She just didn’t understand.

I’ve been thinking about value in the context of work through this lens ever since. It’s a liberating way to look at work and life, but be warned, this rabbit hole goes pretty deep. Once you start to think about value and how we generate it, who owns it and what actually is valuable, some of the basic pillars of our day to day life start to look pretty shaky. I started off thinking about it on largely a personal level, what’s my value and how do I construct a business model around it which allows me to pay my bills? But very soon you start to apply this lens to the wider world, even to the nature of existence itself. What is the value of a day?

If you just strip it back and just make it about productivity, most of us work too hard and the evidence is that it actually reduces our productivity. But go deeper and there’s also something here about the point of productivity itself. Does everything have to have a product?

Let’s say you admit that it’s valuable to do nothing even if your productivity doesn’t go up… you’ll STILL be productive when you do nothing - it’s science. The act of deliberately doing nothing, IS ACTUALLY PRODUCTIVE! Like Archimedes in the bath or Newton sitting under a tree, our brains still work even when we’re not, like they’re filtering the all the stuff they’ve experienced and subconsciously are trying to make sense of them. For me it’s in the shower, or out for a walk or staring out the window of a coffee shop. I think, honestly, this is the main reason why I struggled to give up smoking, I missed sitting on the back porch, looking at the stars and focussing on my breathing - I genuinely think I was addicted to that way more than the nicotine. Punctuation in my day, a ten minute break to do a breathing exercise when things would invariably become more clear.

Now I’ve been thinking about this for years. It started off with just wanting to be less busy, evolved into a critique of capitalism, then into a broader existential question about the point of life. So when Jonny suggested that given the opportunity of Belfast 2024’s commissioning round, we should do a project on Nothing I was like ‘YES’. The 2024 team were asking people to think big, do something really ambitious - what could be more ambitious than starting a public conversation about the value of Nothing?

I mean the irony here is that public sector and charitable orgs are absolutely unable to engage with this concept. The pressure on public finances has translated into an industrial application of all services. Not enough people are focused on thinking about how to do things better, just are you at your desk, and have you spent the budget, and have you counted these beans. Sensationalist reporting, masquerading as getting value for money for the tax payer, has resulted in a joyless, automatous workforce and subsequently worse public services.

So for the last year, throughout the commissioning process, then falling just short, the first reserve, and subsequently getting commissioned in the summer of 2024, like some kind of super sub, I’ve thought even more about all these concepts. There’s an intensity about my relationship with these thoughts now. Before they were what I thought about in my spare time, musing that I might eulogise about in the pub. But now I have the time and resources to actively engage with ideas about Nothing. And I’m sorry to report that the more I think about it the more confusing it gets.

But here’s one thing I have learnt doing this project. People get it. It may start with a joke - ‘Guess what..? Belfast 2024 commissioned us to do Nothing’. But that piques their interest. And then, when I explain what it’s about, without exception, people go ‘GOD! YES! Where do I sign up?’ (With the exception of my kids. They think I’m a grifter).

And that’s the great disconnect we have right now. As humans we know the value of negative space. Like when someone sends you a long email without hitting return ONCE. Or the gaps between the notes in music, or open spaces in cities, or the coffee breaks at a conference, or yoga ffs. Instinctively we know that nothing is important, but the lenses we’ve been given to look at the world won’t let us cherish it.

And ultimately that’s what we’re trying to do here. Just get people to think about Nothing. And let’s be clear, nothing only works in the context of other actual things. But nothing is important too. Have a think about it. Would you like a bit more nothing? Could you be more productive if you had a bit more? Do you need to be more productive? And when you think about nothing... you’re thinking about something... even though the something is nothing... but your thinking... which is something.

Fuck me, Nothing is hard work, I’m off to do nothing instead.