The Do Nothing Club: when AI works for us, who will we become?
A field report from the edge of automation, purpose, and what comes after productivity.
We called it the Do Nothing Club, half-seriously, half as a dare. What if we stopped? Not to rest, but to pause—to lay down our deeply ingrained habits of doing, achieving, producing, optimizing.
As founders of Project Copernicus and Gracious AI, Maarten Smakman and I spent the last decade exploring exponential technologies (and becoming really good friends in the process). And with every advancement, this question became harder to ignore for both of us: If it’s true that machines are going to do most of the work—what’s left for us to do?
“We’re adding extra intelligence to the world—and I don’t yet see clearly what the implications are. That’s why we’re having this conversation.”
— Maarten Smakman
AI is accelerating. Automation is taking over more and more tasks. And yet, we still find ourselves clinging to a value system that tells us that we are what we do. That tells us to stay busy, stay useful, stay productive—or risk disappearing.
“Sometimes I wish we could live in a world without phones. Just cows, trees, each other. But I also use AI for practical things. I’m scared of it—and curious.”
— Aafke de Groot
The ‘Club Meeting’ we had on Dec. 11 2024 wasn’t just a technical exploration. We questioned: What is work, really? A livelihood? A sense of identity? A burden? A calling?
We realized that before we could explore the future of work, we needed to unlearn our assumptions about what work even is. And that couldn’t happen in isolation. We needed a space—not to debate, but to inquire. Not to solve, but to listen. And maybe even to do nothing.
“Electricity changed the world. But we still had to decide what kind of world we wanted to plug in.”
— Paul Hughes
So we gathered a small group of people: artists, filmmakers, ethicists, technologists, trainers, philosophers, mothers, humans. Some deep in the world of AI and emerging tech. Others bringing wisdom from community work, parenting, spiritual practice, or lived experience that doesn’t fit neatly into a résumé. Not to design a new system from the get-go, but to sit together in the in-between. To talk about rest, agency, automation, meaning. To ask, honestly and without pretense: What are we becoming, if we no longer need to be productive to belong?
The essay that follows blends the main learnings from our club meeting, with quotes from the participants, and my personal reflections — moving from the inherited logic of work, through the rupture of automation, toward the roles, rhythms, and responsibilities that might shape the world beyond productivity, soon.
☉ The Old Operating System:
How our work ethic became a measure of our worth
To understand where we might go, we have to understand what we’ve inherited.
For centuries—particularly in the West—work has not just been a way to earn a living. It has been a moral framework. A marker of virtue. A signal of who “deserves” to belong.
This didn’t happen by accident. The Protestant Reformation, and specifically Calvinist theology, deeply shaped the cultural operating system many of us still run on today. In that worldview, salvation was predetermined—but since you couldn’t know if you were among the chosen, worldly success became a proxy. Hard work, discipline, and productivity weren’t just practical—they were signs that you might be on the right side of eternity.
Fast forward a few hundred years, and the logic persists. Restlessness became righteousness. Idleness, a sin. We stopped asking what kind of life do I want to live? and instead learned to ask how can I be useful?
Work became the way we earned the right to exist.
“We confuse profession with vocation. Career with calling. That’s why people say they don’t want to work—but what they really mean is: I don’t want to feel trapped by what work has become.”
— Paul Hughes
Even now, when someone says, “I’m not working at the moment,” it lands with a thud. We don’t quite know what to do with it. Are they okay? Are they looking for something? Are they trying to get back to being productive?
In this system, “doing nothing” isn’t neutral—it’s suspicious. Or worse, shameful.
Even leisure is framed as a form of recovery for more doing. Meditation is a productivity hack. Vacations must refresh us. Weekends must recharge us. Rest becomes a tool in service of more efficient labor, not a right in itself.
“I’ve never cared much for ambition. But I often feel I have to justify that, explain it. I’m proud of my life—but it’s not the kind of story you tell at parties.”
— Myrthe Platenkamp
But as automation advances, as AI handles more of the mechanical, administrative, and even creative tasks we once claimed as uniquely human, this old logic starts to break down.
“Time is different now. AI collapses timelines. So we need new ways to orient—not by speed, but by quality of attention.”
— Lisanne Buik
If your worth is tied to your work—and your work is now done better by a machine—where does that leave you?
That’s the existential rupture we’re sitting in. And perhaps, the real work now is not to scramble for a new job title, but to ask: What if our worth was never meant to be earned in the first place?
☉ Join the Club and Do Nothing
Doing nothing sounds simple. But try it—really try it—and you’ll feel how deeply you’ve been conditioned to equate stillness with failure. And the system doesn’t support it.
“People are being trained out of attention. I’m watching short-form media become the dominant language. The question is—can we stretch the algorithm? Can we make space for long-form again?”
— Thijs Schreuder Rinnooy Kan
To “do nothing” in today’s world is not a passive act. It’s an interruption. A quiet refusal. A test of nervous system, ego, and cultural programming.
“I’m trying to figure out what the role of filmmakers will be when AI can already generate compelling content. Maybe our job isn’t to compete—but to create space for stories that don’t fit the algorithm.”
— Thijs Schreuder Rinnooy Kan
It’s uncomfortable. Not because there’s something inherently wrong with rest—but because we’ve been trained to measure our worth by what we produce, how busy we are, and how visible our contributions appear to others.
Doing nothing forces all of that to the surface.
“Doing nothing means finally seeing that most of our so-called free will is just unconscious algorithmic behavior. You stop—and suddenly all the noise underneath gets loud.”
— Aragorn Meulendijks
That’s why we started the club—not as a cozy metaphor, but as a container. A place to confront the reality that most of us don’t know how to stop. Not really. Not without guilt, anxiety, or the impulse to make it useful.
And yet, this is exactly the crossroads automation has brought us to.
“We’re not here to rest because we’re tired. We’re resting because the current way of working makes no sense. That’s not burnout—it’s intelligence.”
— Paul Hughes
This is where doing nothing becomes radical. It opens the door to questions we’ve spent generations avoiding:
If I am not what I do… who am I?
If I don’t have to hustle to survive… what do I actually want to give?
What am I trying to outrun with all this doing?
These are not casual inquiries. They pull at the root system of how we've constructed identity, belonging, and contribution.
What we learned through the salon is that doing nothing isn’t just about rest. It’s about reorientation.
It’s not a productivity hack. It’s an act of reclamation. Of attention. Of rhythm. Of life-force.
And it doesn’t always feel good. It’s not always peaceful. Often, it’s uncomfortable. But beneath the discomfort, something else begins to emerge: clarity. And sometimes—finally—a sense of choice.
Doing nothing gives space for the real questions to land. And once they land, the real work begins.
☉Key insights from the club meeting
We gathered around a long table in a gallery in Amsterdam. Some skeptical. Some curious. Most somewhere in between. No keynote, no agenda, no slides. Just a shared question:
What happens to work—and to us—when we no longer need to do it to survive?
The conversation didn’t move in a straight line. It spiraled, it paused, it disagreed with itself. And that was the point. We weren’t there to reach consensus—we were there to let something real emerge from the in-between. And it did.
“Success has become about reach. That’s the holy grail now: how many people you can get to watch you. But the things that reach the most people are often the ones that require the least from them.”
— Thijs Schreuder Rinnooy Kan
✧ Work as Identity, Work as Burden
Several voices revealed how deeply work still defines us—even those who’ve consciously stepped outside the system. Myrthe shared that she’s never felt drawn to ambition, and yet often feels she has to justify that. Aafke spoke of her longing for a simpler world, and her discomfort with the growing presence of AI—wondering if it's our latest attempt to play God.
Others reflected on how hard it is to imagine value outside of usefulness.
Even when we want to let go of the old story, it clings to us—not because it's true, but because we haven't yet built a container strong enough to hold the alternative.
✧ Doing Nothing as Privilege—and as Resistance
Nina brought in a vital reminder: “Doing nothing isn’t available to everyone. I work with people for whom survival is real. So if we talk about this, we also have to talk about privilege, access, and power.”
Others reframed it—not as a retreat from responsibility, but as a new kind of responsibility. If we are in a position to question the rules, maybe it's our job to rewrite them.
“I’ve never had a job. Or a benefits check. I’m proud of that. But I’ve also had to reinvent myself constantly, because the system doesn’t know what to do with someone like me.”
— Martijn Aslander
Doing nothing, then, is not a luxury. It’s a disruption. Not inaction, but a form of system refusal. Rest as resistance.
✧ AI as Mirror and Myth
Some spoke with cautious hope: that AI might finally relieve us from the repetitive and the extractive. Others expressed unease—who designs these systems? Who profits from their logic?
Paul asked: “What are we optimizing for?”
If AI is a mirror of our consciousness, then we must be clear about what we want it to reflect.
“There’s a version of AI that’s just an upload of our current broken patterns. And there’s a version that helps us heal what’s been out of sync. It all depends on which consciousness is guiding it.”
— Lisanne Buik
✧ A Future of Contribution, Not Compensation
Again and again, we returned to one insight: work might not be disappearing—but it is being redefined.
Not as employment, but as offering.
Not as survival, but as participation.
Not as what you do to earn worth—but what you give when you’re free to choose.
“I speak with artists who want to change the world, but I also see how overwhelmed they are by speed, funding cuts, and this pressure to go viral. My question is: can we still make space for the experimental, the quiet, the things that don’t scale?”
— Dide Vonk
The salon didn’t give us answers. It gave us permission: To not know. To not fix. To not turn this into a framework. It opened a space where something deeper than work could begin to take shape.
✦ So, What Now?
We’re not offering a blueprint. And we’re not predicting the future. But we are naming a shift that’s already underway. We are choosing to pay attention—to step out of inherited definitions of value and into something more alive.
Here’s what we’re bringing with us from the Do Nothing Club:
1. Doing nothing is not apathy—it’s clarity.
It’s a space to remember what kind of world we want to build.
And it’s not new. Every creative genius—from Einstein to Da Vinci—practiced this.
They each made time, daily, to do… nothing.
Einstein would drift aimlessly in a boat.
Da Vinci would sit for hours, silently, in front of his paintings.
They weren’t brainstorming. They weren’t optimizing. They were wandering.
Neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen, in her study of highly creative people, found that in these “boredom” states, the brain doesn’t power down—it lights up. Multiple regions begin forming novel connections. Insight emerges in the gaps.
We’ve lost that.
Today we fill every in-between moment with content. Scroll. Tap. Swipe.
But brilliance doesn’t come from grinding—it comes from giving space.
Doing nothing isn’t a waste. It’s where the new ideas live.
“What if fulfillment doesn’t look like building something? What if it’s in how you raise your kids, how you make soup for your neighbor, how you stay kind when no one’s watching?”
— Myrthe Platenkamp
2. Work is becoming something else.
Not less important—just less extractive.
Not about what we produce—but how we align.
“All the problems we’re facing are problems of friction. What if technology could remove the friction—but we used that space to come back into coherence with life?”
— Martijn Aslander
3. The future isn’t fixed—but it is shaped by what we do now.
And just as much, by what we stop doing.
What we pause long enough to reimagine.
“I hope that as work transforms, we don’t just fill the space with more doing—but make room for the simple things. Like walking. Like being kind. And let that be enough.”
— Nina Blussé
☉ A Final Reflection
This isn’t the end of the conversation—it’s an opening. A doorway.
Take this essay with you not as doctrine, but as an invitation into inquiry:
👉 What are you still doing that no longer makes sense?
👉 And what might emerge if you gave yourself permission to stop?
Welcome to the Do Nothing Club.
We’re not finished, and we’ve asked more questions than we answered.
But that’s exactly the point.
“For the first time in human history, we might be able to shift from a species organized around survival to one organized around exploration—of consciousness, of meaning, of life itself.”
— Aragorn Meulendijks
Try it.
Take a walk without your phone.
Stare out the window for no reason.
Let yourself get bored.
Not because you’re lazy.
Because you’re listening.
Because your best ideas—your real Self—might be waiting just beyond the noise.
A deep thanks to all participants (for nostalgic reasons I will include their vanishing job titles): Aafke de Groot - Humanized Leadership Trainer, Paul Hughes - Co-founder of Pax Technologica, Myrthe Platenkamp - Jobcoach GGZ InGeest, Thijs Schreuder Rinnooy Kan - Documentary Maker, Aragorn Meulendijks - Future Historian & Keynote Speaker, Martijn Aslander - Technology Philosopher, Nina Blussé - Social Psychologist, Dide Vonk - Podcast Maker, from the initiators of this ongoing inquiry: Lisanne Buik - AI Ethics Speaker and Maarten Smakman - Explorer of Exponential Tech.
New club meetings will be announced here and on the interwebs. Please share this post with others who might be interested to join the club.
Till then, peace out, 🤍 Lisanne