It is only the abandonment of this expectation that keeps me sane.

A necessary caveat – doing nothing is a privilege. Most of us have to work, have to pay our bills, have to collect our meds and commute to work and smile when we get there. I’m not talking about abandoning this expectation and going to live off-grid entirely, like one of those beautiful but clearly malevolently insane white couples with dreadlocks who populate your FYP talking about how they’re receiving spiritual messages from the pyramids of Giza. When I think of what keeps me sane, day to day, week to week, month to month, it’s not the productivity or the accomplishments I can look back on in December for one of those tedious “things I did this year” Instagram posts currently in vogue. It’s the grey spaces in between the achievements and the travels and the birthday parties and weddings, the time in which I was lying prostrate on my sofa watching YouTubers play The Sims.

In the media, this behaviour – slovenliness, laziness – has become shorthand for depression. To lie around without thoughts or activity has become an easy way for creators, filmmakers especially, to communicate that a girl is Not Having A Good Time. Perhaps she’s in a T-shirt with no bra and a pair of tiny pants. Perhaps her boyfriend has just broken up with her. Perhaps she will order Chinese takeaway in those funny little boxes and they will be delivered to her by a sympathetic Deliveroo driver. Soon she will overcome this, have a makeover, wash her hair and get up before 10am. Soon she will be happier. Because how could you realistically be happy if you weren’t out in the world, being beautiful and doing important things? It’s worth noting there is no male equivalent to this trope, because the men are the ones creating it.

The ideal woman is always supposed to be optimising herself. Jia Tolentino says as much in an essay of the same name, taken from her 2019 book Trick Mirror. It unpacks the “tyranny of the ideal woman”, the performance of spontaneity whilst being in the constant pursuit of meticulous and mundane improvement. “Figuring out how to ‘get better’ at being a woman is a ridiculous and often amoral project,” she argues, “a subset of the larger, equally ridiculous, equally amoral project of learning to get better at life under accelerated capitalism. In these pursuits, most pleasures end up being traps, and every public-facing demand escalates in perpetuity. Satisfaction remains, under the terms of the system, necessarily out of reach.”

I was stuck on the shielding list during lockdown, which meant I was stuck inside for nearly three months straight, and was ravenous for a return to my previously hectic, fast-paced life. As soon as I was vaccinated, then, I was back out into the world. I was working more, drinking more, socialising more, spending (much) more, doing everything I couldn’t do beforehand. And then, perhaps unsurprisingly, I crashed. I was one of the wave of millennial and zoomers suffering from that buzzy term: burnout.

More of us are burnt out than ever. Research published in February this year showed that rates of burnout had jumped from 38 percent in 2023 to 42 percent. Social media trends began to reflect it too. “Rot girl summer” was the definitive TikTok trend last year, and this year “lazy girl job” has replaced it. A Gallup survey found that 33 percent of women are burnt out this year, compared to 25 percent of men, and are looking to yeet out of the rat race.

So to deal with it I indulge in pockets of nothingness, to stave off the exhaustion and embrace my inner “lazy girl”, as patrician and diminutive the term might be. I lie prostrate on the sofa watching YouTube videos of people reviewing soap before cutting them into strips. I spend hours losing myself in TikTok influencer drama between people I neither know nor care about. I play a game on my phone that I’ve been playing for the past 12 years, where I help a cartoon butler renovate his parents’ dilapidated mansion (incidentally over the past decade, as female burnout has risen, the rise of female gamers have too – from 38 percent of players identifying as women in 2006 to 41 percent in 2020).

None of these things are useful or wholesome or helpful or productive. I do them and I sit outside myself, not caring about what I look like doing it, or how someone else might think of me for being lazy. I do nothing. I remain (relatively) sane. And then I get up for work in the morning to do it all again.