Why being lazy will make you a better musician

Streamline, leverage, optimise. Monetise your hobbies. Be your own boss. Lock in. Hustle. Grind. Answer emails from bed first thing in the morning. Listen to podcasts at 1.5 speed. Scroll on the toilet, on the bus, in the tube. Check your phone every five minutes, whenever it buzzes demanding your attention. Get up at five in the morning to go to the gym before work. Use ChatGPT to help you decide what to cook for dinner, or what to get your mum for her birthday. Have cold showers and run a half marathon. Post it on social media. Scroll while queueing to pay for three tomatoes and a pound of chicken. Scroll while waiting for your friend for a quick catch up after work. Check your emails again, while watching TV in bed before going to sleep.

Every second of your day is devoted either to work or to distraction. Who could blame you for not finding the right time or space to dedicate to your music? And yet you punish yourself. You feel like a disappointment. But  not for not making music, not really. You punish yourself for not finishing a project quickly enough. For not releasing it on time. For not doing enough promotion. For not marketing yourself well enough. For not getting enough streams. Then you attribute all of this to some form of incorrigible laziness and call it a day. If you could only be more productive, more ambitious, more efficient… You need to seize the day! You should try harder!

But, what if I told you that you are not failing at making music because you’re lazy, but because you’re not lazy enough? What if the key to making music was, actually, being more lazy, committing to making the least of your time, to wasting it every day, indolently, irresponsibly?

Music, like all the arts, is good for you precisely because it’s good for nothing. It is the point of everything because it is completely pointless. And yet most of us seem to treat our artistic vocations like a corporate 9 to 5: we need to optimise our workflow, buy better, more expensive gear, improve our metrics, find a better marketing strategy, commit to a more consistent release schedule.

Being an aspiring musician puts an individual in a very uncomfortable, paradoxical position in society: forced to understand and justify your creative work in the same terms as your full-time office job, finding a way to monetise your music becomes your biggest fantasy. In turn, the desire to create becomes a paralysing obligation, and a deep sense of frustration sets in when you can’t deliver: you clearly have no talent and never did. You are a fraud. You should never pick up a guitar again

But this is like trimming the leaves of a dying, dried out plant instead of watering it. Making art should be an ode to inefficiency, an act of devotion to boredom and incompetence, because it can only be born in a life that is loose enough to harbour it and soft enough to let it flourish. Being lazy and unproductive is not having failed to create, but rather the necessary condition for creation. 

The truth is that singing, composing melodies, writing lyrics, dancing or making others dance, are not activities easily justified for their usefulness or their productivity, and this is why, in our world, they’re often considered unrealistic, childish or indulgent vocations. However, we must remember there was a time before ours when all of these things were considered to be precious and important simply because they were beautiful and human life is deserving of beauty – it is our birthright.

This is why doing nothing is often one of the most powerful acts of resistance to the demands of modern life, as well as the perfect breeding ground for artistic creation.

However, by “doing nothing” I don’t mean doomscrolling, or bingewatching YouTube. I mean embracing boredom and solitude: lying down on the grass, or on your bed looking at the ceiling, taking a stroll with no direction, looking out the window, laughing with a friend, reading for hours, people watching from a comfortable bench under a tree in the middle of the city. I mean claiming your right as a human being to immerse yourself in the world around you inefficiently and serving no purpose, because, more often than not, a moment of emptiness is what you need to get inspiration.

For the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in a world flooded by opinions, words and images, we have lost our right to silence, and therefore our ability to think deeply: “It’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. [...] What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying” (Negotiations, p. 129).

I know, I know… French philosophers, solitude, emptiness… This is starting to sound like the lecture your cousin gave you at Christmas dinner after his first semester of sociology. But bear with me. What I’m talking about is very familiar to you, even if you've forgotten it. Your best ideas as a child, your most passionate games and most elaborate projects, came from that unique, shimmering emptiness of hot summer afternoons with nothing to do. What made your childhood so creative was precisely the freedom to be lazy and to explore the world around you aimlessly and impractically.

“But I’m an adult now”, you might say, “I am boring and have many responsibilities and have long lost my sense of childlike wonder”. Don't fret. You will not leave this blog post without some irresponsible suggestions on how to become a less productive member of society.  

1. Keep a folder (physical or virtual) of all your unfinished pieces and projects. This will be the home of all your failures and frustrated attempts, so that you don’t lose or forget them. Make it pretty and comfortable. Visit it periodically and gaze at it with motherly pride. What you leave unfinished is as important as your most perfect masterpiece, because your art is a process that will last as long as your lifetime. Your body of work is not supposed to look like a museum inventory, but rather like a living, breathing organism, or an alarmingly messy drawer. If you don’t want to listen to me, listen to Pablo Picasso: “I hate the finished. Death is final. The gunshot finishes off. The almost finished is life”. 

2. Set aside time for some old-school, bona fide boredom. No phone, no scrolling, no podcasts in the shower. The purpose of this is not to “make the most of your free time”, but rather to waste it entirely and with total freedom. During this set amount of time, there are no goals to reach, no expectations. Just you, alive, in this world. Most likely, an idea will find you. Maybe it will be good, maybe it will be bad, but you have to make some room for its arrival, so get rid of all the noise. 

3. Make a secret song. This is a song that you will swear never to show to anyone. You will never gain any validation, recognition, or money from this song. This is a one-on-one encounter between you and your musical vocation. How do you feel when you make music without expectations? 

4. Make a song that is bad. Use it as a vessel to accommodate all the clichés, all the cringey lyrics and predictable melodies that you never give yourself permission to use. This is both an experiment and an exorcism, so don’t hold back: you might accidentally invent a new genre, or fall in love with music again. 

5. Ditch the coffee shop and the co-working space for a library, a park, a square, a friend’s house or a random bench under a tree. Reclaim public and communal spaces in your town or city and be lazy in them. Enjoy them and look around. There might be others like you. 

Consider this a formal invitation to rebel against a world that is draining you and depleting you of your creativity; that is hijacking your time and selling your attention to the highest bidder. Refuse to treat your music like a job. Reclaim your right to beautiful things. Reclaim your right to be lazy. You might just become a better musician in the process.