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“The only journey is the one within.”

—Rainer M. Rilke

Rilke was a sensitive person ill-suited to his times. The years following the turn of the 20th century in Europe saw the brutal birth of the modern industrial economy and the horrors of World War I. This period also saw the increasing obsession on the part of the capitalist class with measuring time and maximizing worker efficiency. And there are the first hints of the nascent time management industry beginning to wrap its tentacles around the culture. Clocks in offices, factories, and homes were becoming widespread for the first time. Human workers began to be thought of as machines in a system designed to produce profit for the owners of the economy. Against this backdrop, the sensitive and introspective Rilke sacrificed romantic love, his family, and material comforts in order to pursue his art.

Rilke knew that spending time doing nothing was extremely important for his creative process. He aspired to be idle with joy—which to our over-worked and over-scheduled 21st-century ears sounds shocking. Enjoying idleness is anathema to our cultural belief that without unrelenting activity we are somehow not living up to our potential, a belief which we are taught implicitly from infancy.

Modern neuroscience may show us that in fact the opposite is true—our true potential can only be realized through periods of doing nothing. As Oscar Wilde writes in the
Soul of Man Under Socialism
: “Humanity amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure—which, and not labor, is the aim of man—or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight.”

Recent research is revealing that some forms of self-knowledge may only appear to us in idle states. The default mode network activates not only when we are at rest, but also when we turn our attention to ourselves and “
spect intro
.” Our mind begins to wander and the contents of our unconsciousness can percolate up into awareness. The default mode network allows us to process information that is related to social relationships, our place in the wider world, fantasies we have about the future, and of course: emotions.

Rilke spent much of his adult life actually wandering Europe in search of the ideal place—both physically and spiritually—in which to write poetry. He traveled to Russia and met Tolstoy, he spent time in Sweden, Italy, France, and finally ended up in Switzerland. His work was so important to some patrons that these wealthy people often paid for Rilke to live at their villas or castles while he worked—or, rather, did not work.

In fact, Rilke waited fifteen years between major volumes of poetry—from
New Poems
published in 1907 to what many consider his life's crowning achievements:
The Duino Elegies
and
Sonnets to Orpheus
, both in 1922. He wrote some poetry during those years; however he considered these “occasional” poems.
The Elegies
took over ten years to complete. Rilke's great poems came to him suddenly, and he regarded them as gifts from outside himself, perhaps from angels. Rilke described the experience of writing a poem as simply having to take dictation. One of his great translators, the American poet Robert Bly, writes how Rilke would occasionally miss a rhyme when trying to capture a poem because he could not write fast enough.

From a neuroscience perspective, Rilke was learning to let brain regions like the medial prefrontal cortex report images and associations from brain regions like the hippocampus and neocortex, whose deepest contents do not always enter awareness. In our constant struggle to achieve success or even just keep our jobs, we use the parts of our brain that process immediate external events. This externally focused network toggles off the default mode network and prevents us from accessing what may be going on in the rest of our brains. Yet our brains are perpetually generating and responding to emotions—and all this emotional energy must be dissipated somewhere.

Rilke also struggled with bouts of depression, possibly because he did not spare himself in his relentless self-examination. He allowed every ugly side of his internal world to surface to his consciousness so that he could scrutinize it. And here we can see the razor thin line between the peak of genius and the abyss of depression and madness: Rilke lived much of his whole adult life very close to that line.

“The lazy man does not stand in the way of progress. When he sees progress roaring down upon him he steps nimbly out of the way.”

—Christopher Morley, “On Laziness”

Rilke's amazing ability to explore his unconscious and dredge up perhaps long forgotten scenes and emotions from his youth was likely the result of his brain's default mode network being allowed to be active while he was being idle.

For many people this can be a horrifying experience. There is probably a lot of stuff in your unconsciousness that you'd much rather leave there. Could it be that these uncomfortable things you are suppressing by scheduling your day to oblivion are knocking on the door to your consciousness for a reason? The common sense notion about “workaholics” is that they find idleness and inactivity to be unbearable because they are escaping emotional pain through constant work.

When children enter school, and increasingly even before they enter school, parents fill up their lives with a stream of activities: sports, early exposure music classes, Chinese immersion school, summer camps, volunteer soup kitchen duties, dressage lessons, theater coaching, mathletics, and science workshops. There seems to be a pervasive and deep-seated anxiety among a certain class of parents that their children might actually have time to hang around and be children. Parents are forced to work longer and longer hours, sometimes just to keep the same pay. To replace ourselves we force our children to endure an endless barrage of activities that serve as proxy parents. We do this in order to convince ourselves that we still participate in some meaningful way in our children's lives.

We can get reports from teachers or coaches on our child's successes—all without actually ever seeing the child do the activity we signed them up for. After all, we have more important things to do, like work! It should come as no surprise that as “play dates” overtake simply hanging around with friends and actually playing outside, childhood anxiety and depression rates are soaring, in tandem with childhood obesity.

The current generation of children may be the first ever to have shorter life-expectancy than the previous generation. Whatever mountains of epidemiological and clinical evidence you need to convince yourself that this is real, the underlying cause is quite straightforward: children who do not spend several hours
every day
outside running around, hanging out with friends, not doing anything in particular, and instead spend every moment of every day doing parent-induced tasks and lessons, seeing friends on a schedule, eating massively processed food, and playing video games in order to virtually explore their worlds, become fat and depressed.

There are hundreds of books and magazine articles on time management for children with titles like
Organization; Time Management & Study Skills for Children
;
Late, Lost and Unprepared: A Parents' Guide to Helping Children with Executive Functioning,
and
Get That Kid Organized!

For those achievement-obsessed parents and students for whom unnecessary pharmacological manipulation with amphetamine-derived ADHD medication is not financially or morally problematic, there are apparently plenty of academic-doping doctors who will prescribe ADHD medicine to undiagnosed students so they can attain artificial laser-like focus and crush their competition on the SATs.

These doctors are no different ethically from the shady underworld-doping doctors one finds in professional sports. And I would argue it is the same “win-at-all-costs” culture that breeds the desire to use any means necessary to attain what are essentially meaningless test results.

Forcing a child to become a pharmaceutically-enhanced and hyper-organized mini-adult at an early age removes the child's sense of control over her world. Depression and anxiety are highly correlated with people's sense of control over their own lives.

Psychologists have long used a questionnaire to assess the degree to which people feel control over their lives called the Rotter Internal-External Locus of Control Scale. If you score toward the internal end of the scale you feel that you are source of control over your life, and if you score toward the external end of the scale you feel that your life is controlled by someone or something other than you.

Several studies have shown that the more toward the internal end of the scale you are, the less likely you are to become depressed and anxious. When researchers analyzed data from the Rotter scale over a forty-two year period from 1960 to 2002, they found that scores have shifted from the internal end of the scale to the external. These scores had shifted so much that an average young person in 2002 was more external (felt that external forces controlled her life) than eighty percent of young people in the 1960s.

In 2010,
Newsweek
magazine ran a story devoted to what it called “The Creativity Crisis,” which received moderate attention.
Newsweek
reported that scores on psychological tests that are designed to assess a child's creativity have been steadily declining since 1990.

This, despite the fact that IQs have been rising. After analyzing the data from around three hundred thousand children and adults, Kyng Hee Kim, a researcher at William & Mary, found that this decline in creativity is most pronounced in exactly the age group from which you'd expect the most creativity, kindergarten through sixth grade. As children become more scheduled, more measured, more managed to achieve, and more hijacked by digital media, they become less and less creative.

Rilke described entering school as entering captivity. Modern parents have become preoccupied with developmental activities that supposedly enhance their children's chances of success even before school begins, success as defined by grades, future salaries, and awards.

In Rilke's poem “Imaginary Biography,” he describes the horror of starting school, which for me involved sobbing as my mother left me standing in the line of other seemingly happy kids at the kindergarten door:

First childhood, no limits, no renunciations, no goals.

Such unthinking joy.

Then abruptly terror, schoolrooms, boundaries, captivity,
and a plunge into temptation and deep loss.

Ironically for a culture obsessed with optimizing child development, increasing evidence about the brain shows that not having externally directed goals is crucial for the brain's development.

Through the constant external demands and activities in which they are forced to partake, plus countless hours spent using digital devices, children have less and less time to introspect, process social and emotional experiences, and self-reflect.

What's more, children may develop an uncomfortable relationship with their idle selves, like many adults. When this happens, becoming idle will initially induce a feeling very similar to what a smoker craving a cigarette experiences: restless desperation. The child will seek out external stimulation in digital devices, approval from teachers, or from other adults.

In a recent paper called “Rest is Not Idleness: Implications of the Brain's Default Mode for Human Development and Education,” psychologists Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Joanna Christodoulu, and Vanessa Singh hypothesize that allowing children to engage in free-form daydreaming and other types of inattentive states is essential to the development of social skills.

They review the last decade of evidence about the default mode network and discuss its implications for human development early in life and education. If the child's life is filled with “systematically high environmental attention demands,” they posit that the process of developing the ability to reflect, create meaning from experience, and reconcile memories with current experience will be disrupted. A child's brain needs time to sift through everything that happens in a given day, consolidate these experiences, and integrate them into the larger self which is being formed through childhood.

The only way to allow this process to happen is to be idle. Turning off the outside world for a significant amount of time each day without demands or expectations is necessary for children. It could turn out that most of childhood should be free-form daydreaming, playing without purpose, and the experience of unthinking joy in order for later mental health.

In one of his
Letters to a Young Poet
, Rilke writes, “The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and unerringly a new revelation can enter us, and the more we can make it our own. Later on when it ‘happens'—when it manifests in our response to another person—we will feel it as belonging to our innermost being.”

Immordino-Yang et al. write that time and skills for what they call “constructive internal reflection” are beneficial for emotional learning and well-being. And when a child spends all day directing her attention to the external world her ability to understand “what this means for the world and the way I live my life” will be undermined.

Just as muscles need time to recover after exercise, our brains need time to recover after engagement with the external world. For example, research indicates that young people who send text messages extremely often tend to score lower on tests that measure moral reflectivity. This could be because with each new text, the task positive network is engaged, thereby suppressing activity in the default mode network. We start to identify more with the phone in our pockets than the mind in our heads.