A spacing out competition: For a busy world, why leisure is healing

There must be more to it than a relentless pursuit of targets to achieve, sales figures to better and markets to conquer. Why not lay down the tools and exit the workshop. And watch the birds trill.

The contestant with the most stable heart rate wins. Conducted in the centre of bustling cities, the idea is to prioritise leisure as the world rushes and races on.

It is said that the early bird snags the worm. But what if the bird wants to take its time over it? Go about its business at leisure, rather than rush into it? Woopsyang, a South Korean artist, came up with the idea of a “space-out competition” in which participants (or performance artistes, if you will), have one simple task: Sit or lie around. Do nothing. Don’t fall asleep. The contestant with the most stable heart rate wins. Conducted in the centre of bustling cities, the idea is to prioritise leisure as the world rushes and races on.

By all accounts, stillness or doing-nothing is a scarce resource today. Yet, the productivity hustle is a modern enterprise. According to a Financial Times report, for over 95 per cent of a 3,00,000-year existence, human beings led more leisurely lives than they do today. The acceleration of automation, some hoped, would bring back the lost art of doing little. In 2023, for instance, Bill Gates had said that if done right, manual labour could be minimised and leisure could play a bigger role in lives. Yet, in a world ruled more and more by gig economies, wars that disrupt and technology that complicates lives even as it eases them, there seems to be little respite from the stranglehold of busy-ness.