Doing Nothing

by James Currie

Doing Nothing is a book about doing nothing in a system where there is always something pressing that ought to be done. Not the productive unstructured time of self-help books, but the aimless and ineffective doing nothing of procrastination, resignation, and melancholia. James Currie pursues these themes across a wide terrain of experiences, materials, and examples from the personal, local, and anecdotal, through to the existential, cosmological, and apocalyptic—reflecting, among other things, on the COVID pandemic, the lives of teenagers, Lars Van Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia, work, play, and politics. Doing Nothing offers a lived-in embrace of queer states of being that stand against liveliness and the mournful feelings of entrapment and shame that exist alongside the unexpected opportunities such situations afford.

104 pages, Paperback

Published February 3, 2026

Reviews

[Seyhan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A small invitation to slow down, observe, and notice what is already there. 🌿 In short, practicing an intentional unintentionality can be essential for a creative and enjoyable life. Sometimes or regularly “Stop and DO NOTHING“ .

The Italians even have a beautiful phrase for it: DOLCE FAR NIENTE , the sweetness of doing nothing.

(PREFACE: Faced with the increasingly unlivable conditions of our times, where “too much” has become the presiding modality—where we work too much, expect too much of ourselves, are bombarded with too much information, overwhelmed by too much stimulation, and endlessly confronted with political and ecological catastrophes that are close to being too much for us to be able to do anything about, and sometimes too much even to conceptualize—
many have started taking counsel from the idea that less is best, and that the injunction always to be “doing something” is as much a symptom of the disease from which we are suffering as it is a rallying cry for the making of a better world.)

[Elisabeth Sadler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well - this book definitely made me think! It is also superbly well written. There is plenty I disagree with - particularly the arguments related to children and teenagers. The book deliberately seems to sit outside any genre that I am aware of. There is poetry, philosophy, a bit of autobiography and film review.... definitely an anti- self help book, and anti American culture. Overall, a thoroughly enjoyable read.