Niksen • verb • (nick-sin)
Definition: to do nothing; to be idle or doing something without any purpose
Origin: Dutch
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A beguiling dilemma of America’s ethnocidal and capitalistic society is that we struggle to find the language to articulate actions that are both healthy and do not involve work.
If you are idly sitting down and not being “productive,” our society is prone to describing you as lazy. A healthy person must be vigorous and full of energy, so inactivity has now become unhealthy.
Likewise, a good day is often synonymous with having a productive day where you successfully accomplished a myriad of tasks. A bad day would be one in which you hardly accomplish any tasks, regardless of whether or not you had tasks that needed to be accomplished that day.
Despite all of us knowing that there is a benefit to being idle and unproductive from time to time, the absence of language makes it harder for us to justify these benefits to ourselves and others. If we are happily doing nothing for an hour or so and encounter a friend or family member imploring us to get up and stop being lazy, they come equipped with an arsenal of language to justify disrupting our serenity.
Without the language to defend the necessity of our serene idleness, it becomes more likely that we will succumb to the narrative of the supposed benefit of perpetual activity in the unending quest to be perpetually productive.
Niksen is a word that we all must add to our vocabulary as we cultivate a healthy life not contingent on perpetual labor.
Niksen & Productivity
Last year during COVID-19, my partner’s sister and 12-year-old nephew stayed with us in Washington, D.C. COVID-19 was more out of control in New York City, so we thought it made sense for them to stay with us until things settled down. In our house, we had three adults working from home and a pre-teen doing home school.
Our house had essentially turned into a small co-working space, and for the first time, I got a closer look at the amount of homework American children are given. This child would start school around 8 AM every day and did school work until dinner. It seemed like he was pulling 12-hour days Monday through Friday, and on the weekends we spent time helping him catch up on the work he didn’t finish during the week. His day hardly allocated any time for idleness and the work seemed to never end.
There were so many moments when this child just wanted to be able to do nothing but our discourse and culture do not allow for being idle. There was no word or philosophy that he could articulate to express the necessity of him not working and being idle instead. Niksen is the word and philosophy that this child needed, but America’s linear mindset makes it incredibly hard for us to effectively engage in niksen.
Niksen is often defined as being idle, but what it really means is engaging in actions without any noticeable or intended purpose. Niksen could be staring out the window, walking around the block, going on a bike ride, or listening to music. Niksen can be almost anything so long as you do not reduce it to a linear purpose.
If you are going on a walk because your Fitbit says you need to get in your steps for the day then that would not be niksen. You must walk because you have a yearning to walk; nothing more and nothing less.
I engage in a lot of niksen and it always gets me in trouble. People think I’m wasting time. My expressions of niksen are frequently viewed as a vice that other people need to begrudgingly tolerate. My niksen is primarily playing puzzle games on my phone. For years, 2048 was my favorite game.
I play these games because I enjoy stimulating my brain and trying to figure things out. That is the only purpose. If I’m bored, I’ll quickly play a game or two. Since doing nothing and niksen have no obvious purpose, it is easy for those around me to conflate these disparate actions as being one and the same.
Years ago at a previous job, my boss would get annoyed with me because I was playing games on my phone and going on walks around the block far too often. This boss did not believe that I was productive enough and that they were paying me to do nothing. Eventually, it came time for my review, and to their astonishment, I was actually the most productive employee.
By engaging in activities without a clear purpose, I ended up becoming even better at the more mundane linear activities that required a purpose.
Niksen & Stille
Niksen can be many different things, but it often consists of getting in touch with nature. Going outside, laying on the grass, and aimlessly staring up into the sky is also niksen. As I thought more and more about this week’s word, I kept on thinking about one of the earliest words in the newsletter: stille.
Stille is a German and Dutch word that is often translated as silence, but it actually means stillness. In German and Dutch, when someone requests “silence” they are actually requesting “stillness.” This is a subtle, yet profound linguistic shift.
Silence is the absence of sound, but stillness is the absence of disruptive sound. Stillness consists of turning off the tv and other man-made noise so that you can listen and be still with nature. Germany has such a reverence for stille that when you buy appliances and lawnmowers the decibel levels are listed. People aspire to have the quietest, most innocuous machines so that their days are filled with stille.
Stille prompts daydreaming, birdwatching, long walks, and creative activities that enrich our soul, or geist, yet without any discernible purpose. These are all activities that we could also classify as niksen.
An attachment to place and a connection to nature cultivates the enriching unproductive activities we all need to cherish so that we can have fulfilling lives. The Dutch, like the Germans, also have a strong cultural connection to their environment and a previous newsletter about the word polderen helps explain this fascinating relationship.
America’s ethnocidal society has normalized a way of life where we all have a stronger connection to labor than to the environment, and due to this, we struggle to articulate the necessity of disconnecting from work and engaging in the natural world. Tragically, disconnecting from work has primarily become a luxury that each of us can partake in only after we have accomplished a monumental amount of work. It is a break we receive only once we are about to break down due to being overworked.
Starting today, try to empower yourself through niksen to defend and articulate the necessity of engaging in a cherished activity with no clear purpose. Tell yourself and those around you that you are engaging in niksen, and try to not feel guilty about being unproductive.