Your complimentary articles You’ve read one of your four complimentary articles for this month. You can read four articles free per month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please Articles Wendell O’Brien says, ‘Just Don’t Do It’. In a sense, every living person is always doing something – breathing, at least, or sitting in a chair – and even a dead man is lying in his tomb. There are nonetheless perfectly good senses in which a person, even if alive, may be said to be, at some time or other, ‘doing nothing’ or ‘being idle’. My primary concern in this essay is to defend idleness – not for everyone, and not all the time, but in moderation, for those who love and have a disposition for it. In various Eastern traditions there are states sometimes conceived of as ones in which you do nothing. In Daoism, for instance, there is wu wei , or non-action, the sage’s customary mode of being.…