Nobody Asks How You Are Being

We were beings. Now we are doings.

I know this sounds like a complaint about modern life, the usual noise about burnout and busyness and phones. That is not what I mean by it. What I mean is that somewhere along the way, existing stopped being enough on its own, and started needing a reason. Somewhere we started having nervous systems that have forgotten how to rest inside themselves, because resting has started to feel like falling behind. You can feel the difference in your own body if you pay attention. Sit down and do nothing for five minutes. Not scroll, not plan, not even relax on purpose. Just sit. For most adults, something in the chest starts to protest almost immediately. What we call boredom is often just avoidance. Whatever’s already there, restlessness, guilt, some feeling you haven’t looked at, has nowhere to hide once you’re not moving or producing. So the mind reaches for a task, calls the discomfort boredom, and quickly goes back to motion.

The Swap

That feeling arrived in fragments, from a thousand imperceptible signals over the years, that being isn’t enough on its own. The child who is praised specifically for achievements and rarely for anything else. The culture that treats rest and play as something you earn through sufficient output rather than something you are simply owed as a living creature. Where stillness started to look like laziness instead of what it actually is, which is a nervous system doing exactly what it is supposed to do when it is not under threat.

I think about this a lot in relation to my son. I am not trying to protect him from ever working hard or ever wanting things. But I do not want him to casually learn about himself that his worth is something he has to generate.

Nobody asks how you are being

Once that swap happens, it is very hard to notice, because everything around you is built to reinforce it. By the time most of us are grown, the swap is complete and invisible. We no longer experience ourselves as beings who sometimes do things. We experience ourselves as doings, full stop, with being reduced to the pause between tasks, a pause that itself gets filled with more doing the moment it is noticed. Productivity becomes identity. Your output becomes the thing people ask about when they ask how you are doing.

And a person who has swapped being for doing will keep swapping, because doing never actually satisfies the hunger that being was supposed to satisfy in the first place. You cannot achieve your way into feeling like you are enough. The two things are not the same. You can spend your whole life mistaking one for the other and never once feel the relief you were chasing.

What Chasing Actually Costs

The most obvious cost is attention. A mind that has learned to associate stillness with falling behind cannot stay still. A person who is always proving something jump from a thing to the next, because staying still means the proving stops. So the attention fragments. The mind keeps moving. It finishes one thing already half thinking about the next, present nowhere in particular, everywhere at once and nowhere at all.

I notice this most clearly with my son. I have never once cared what he ends up making with the sticks, the words or the mornings. I’ve never steered it, never asked what it’s for. What I actually watch, every time, is how he is while he’s making it. Whether he’s still in his body, still somewhere real, or already somewhere else. When I don’t have the ability to just watch that for twenty straight minutes without some part of me wondering what I should be doing instead, I know I need to stop and being.

When he is deep in something, building an elaborate structure out of whatever is lying around, narrating a story only he can follow, there was something in me that used to feel a small itch of impatience watching it.

That itch is exactly what I refused to hand him. I didn’t want him to grow up needing to justify his afternoons. I do not want his sense of being allowed to exist to depend on a running tally of what he has accomplished that day.

The world is loud about wanting your attention, and a mind that has already been trained to associate worth with productivity is an easy mind to steal attention from, because it is already looking for the next thing to chase.

Teaching a Child Being Is Enough

This is the part that matters most to me.

When a kid spends an entire afternoon doing what looks like nothing, when he lies in the grass and watches clouds move for longer than feels reasonable to anyone measuring productivity, try not to interrupt it with a suggestion for something more useful. But see and witness the incredible beauty in it. That stillness is not empty. It is the exact thing I am trying to protect in kids, the thing that gets trained out of most of us by the time we are adults.

I would rather my son grow up with an attention span, with the ability to truly stay and be somewhere, with the felt knowledge that he does not have to earn his place in the world by constantly demonstrating his usefulness or capacity. That knowledge is not something you can explain to a child in words. It is something you protect by not constantly asking him to prove himself in the first place.

Being Underneath the Doing

None of this means doing is the enemy. I still work, I still build things, I still want things and go after them. But there is a difference between doing that comes from a full place and doing that comes from a hungry one. Doing that comes from being is expansive. It does not need to prove anything because there is nothing left to prove. Doing that comes from chasing is never enough, because the hole it is trying to fill was never a doing-shaped hole to begin with.