What needs to be done to do nothing?

Ever shutdown your computer and it takes a while before it does nothing? Sometimes for you to do nothing, you have to do something too.

I’m strict judicious careful conscious with my time trying to get home from work before 6:30 PM. It’s a 25min commute and I’ll take the train, the T2 Line from Town Hall towards the Inner West. We have an open concept office floor-plan so I pack up my laptop, put on the sunnies, pop in the AirPods and badge out. I’m on my way to do nothing.

Well not actually nothing.
As the air moves in and out of my lungs, my heart is picking up the pace as I rush towards the train, my thoughts are on which pocket my Opal card is crammed into, and my stomach is grumbling. I’m decidedly doing something.

As humans we’re not really familiar with the concept of doing nothing. We always have a little “Status:” tag on the taskbar of life.

Status: Rushing

As I pass the gates to the train platform, I think “Later tonight, melatonin willing, I’ll be Status: Sleeping” (Yes, I can think in bold and italics)

Your computer has a different experience. It “understands” the concept of fully unplugged.

Earlier today, my Outlook client locked up, not responding to ⌘ + Q I opted for a force quit. Why can’t I gracefully stop this program. It’s stuck, the OS knows it’s stuck, I know it’s stuck, we both hope it gets unstuck, and without my guidance, it will stay stuck indefinitely.

“pkill -9 Outlook” is what I’m thinking as I Option + Two Finger Click on the icon and jab at “Force Quit”. It’s gone. I dismiss the, so far useless, Microsoft Crash Reporter.

Outlook is no more. It’s doing nothing. Took it long enough.

Status: Waiting

The T2 train line at this time is typically served every 3-9min. I’m viewing the train’s progress on an app. I’m observing a system that I can’t change, I’m getting on the train regardless. A watched pot does boil, but there really isn’t a reason to watch it happen. I check my notifications, I never clear them, they’re AI summarized and ordered mostly by priority.

Swipe - 2 posts on Reddit -Swipe - Mail checked - Swipe

We really don’t do “nothing” well. It’s probably not possible to be alive and doing nothing at the same time - put it in the comments if I’m wrong. Some might say we made computers to think like we do - sure - but you can turn a computer back on after its been unplugged for a few years.

Status: Sitting

I sit in the caboose last train-car. I still have my headphones in, I’m listening to nothing.
My AirPods are playing an inverted waveform of what my ears should be hearing. This nothing takes quite a lot of something to exist. I’m very much enjoying the silence and blissfully unaware of the tiny ARM processors whirring away. They're working harder to create nothing than they would to play something. It's a manufactured nothing, an artificial absence.

The train lurches forward, and my mind drifts to system states. In computing, we have clear delineations: running, stopped, sleeping, terminated. But human consciousness exists in fuzzy states, always processing something, even when we think we're doing nothing.

Status: Transit

My phone shows

6:12 PM

I could check my email again, but I recognize this as the brain's equivalent of a polling loop - an inefficient use of resources. Better to implement an interrupt-driven architecture: the important emails will notify me. The unimportant ones can wait until tomorrow's inevitable Status: switch back to work mode.

Between stations, I notice my reflection in the window, superimposed on the passing graffiti of RAYGUN and other indecipherable, yet artistic, analogue manifestos - each one a pixel-perfect act of beautiful destruction, sprayed in defiance of the cleaning crews' eternal war on expression. The writers' tags float by like deprecated commands in a legacy codebase: still executing, still meaningful, just not to everyone.

Status: Background Processing

Even as I try to do nothing, my mind performs garbage collection on the day's events, defragments memories, optimizes neural pathways.

I’m thinking about the interactions I had with my team and clients, the random stranger with the full body tattoos on the sidewalk yesterday with the bold letters on his knuckles that smiled at me before we spontainously fist-bumped - whats his story?

The human equivalent of ‘system maintenance’ runs whether we consciously initiate it or not. Maybe that's why true nothing eludes us - we're always running some background process, always maintaining some minimal viable state of consciousness.

If we all somehow hit a metaphorical pause button at the same time then no one would notice. Right?

Status: Macdonaldtown Station

This is my least favorite station - an island platform floating in a sea of rail junction switches, servicing what feels like a pointer to a deallocated suburb. Two minutes of execution overhead between Redfern and Newtown that any decent optimizer would eliminate. Even its name throws a 404 error - there is no Macdonaldtown - just a dangling reference to some long garbage-collected gone estate.

I’ve realized I’m doing something again - this station is the bane of my quasi-meditative return home.

The train doors remain open. Through the window, I watch exactly three passengers disembark into the liminal space, their footsteps would echo on the empty platform if I could hear them.

In a way I'm jealous of the station; it's achieved what I'm struggling towards - a near-perfect implementation of doing nothing. Most trains pass through without triggering its interrupt handler, leaving it in its preferred idle state, executing its null operation with flawless efficiency.

Status: Mindwandering

I've had my head deep into event driven architecture patterns today - there's no human equivalent to Lambda functions, those ephemeral pieces of code that spring into existence, execute their purpose, and vanish without a trace. We can't just spin up a new instance of ourselves to handle peak load, or gracefully terminate when our task is complete. Our consciousness persists, an always-on service with no shutdown command. OOO look at me I’m Mr Meeseeks - At least existence isn’t pain.

Maybe that’s why it feels so unnatural to build with functions the first few times, it’s a new experience that we can’t understand ourselves. Our brains are stateful monoliths, carrying years of accumulated technical debt and deprecated memories. I can't just garbage collect the embarrassing things I said at last year's Christmas party.

I watch as the train reaches platform after platform, its wheels silently clicking against the rails like a broken mechanical clock. The sun catches the metallic reflection of a passing train on the opposite track - a perfect metaphor for parallel processing that I'll probably forget before I can write it down.

Status: Preparing

I'm indexing through stations, waiting for length-1 so I can run my exit routine. My internal countdown hits one station to go. Where is my opal card again? No-one is seated next to me and I have a clear path to the isle. Zero resistance.

Zero is a weird concept.

I have 5 apples and I give you 5 apples now I have zero apples. Zero is an intellectual abstraction, a placeholder, a mathematical sleight of hand that revolutionized how we think about quantity. Think about your bank account balance. When If it shows $0.00, that's not nothing - it's a very specific something that means the absence of money. It's a pointer that points to nothing, but the pointer itself exists. The account of the zero exists but holds nothing itself. You still have an account if there’s nothing in it. Can you only have zero of something if you had more than zero of it previously?

As I depart the train, my noise-cancelling headphones create a near-zero noise environment, but only because there was noise to cancel. You can't cancel nothing. The AirPods aren't creating silence - they're creating anti-noise, a deliberate something that results in a perceived nothing.

I’m tapping my opal card on the reader so the system acknowledges I’m no longer in transit. The state of my card will read that I’m “tapped-off” if one of those pesky ticket inspectors showed up.

In memory management, null is not the same as unallocated. A null pointer is still a pointer - it's explicitly pointing to nothing, which is different from a pointer that doesn't exist. My opal card doesn’t have an unallocated status - it’s something closer to a null status. It’s still maintaining its identity even in its empty state. It's a container labeled "nothing here right now, but there could be."

Maybe that's why zero is such a strange concept - it's not really nothing, it's the deliberate acknowledgment of nothing.

Status: Walking

The evening air hits my face as I remove my AirPods, their manufactured nothing gives way to the suburb's symphony of something. Really it was always something I heard. Hearing nothing is still to acknowledge the existence of nothing and if it exists is it really absent? As I finish my last-kilometer commute on foot I think about how the world doesn’t “do zero”. Even in sleep, our minds play maintenance scripts dreams and defrag consolidate our memories. We invented zero, just like we invented the concept of nothing, just like we invented the idea that we could somehow achieve a status of doing nothing.

By the time I reach my home I think about if I have been successful in doing nothing. By my admission that nothing is something. I have to agree that I have succeeded.

After all, doing nothing is just something we collectively made up.