Starting heart rate: 116 beats per minute
Sitting cross-legged on a pink yoga mat, enjoying a cool spring breeze from Seoul’s Han River and listening to traffic rumbling on the bridge overhead, I am trying to achieve a stony state of inactivity.
Several things are making this difficult (and amping up my heart rate): a growing ache in my shoulders, the announcer’s booming commentary, the weighty gaze of a crowd of spectators and an evolutionary instinct — passed down from our hunter-gatherer days — to stay active.
The biggest stressor: wondering how I measure up against 79 fellow contestants, all of us striving — silent, expressionless, unmoving — to be the best nothing doer of all.
This is the annual Space-Out Competition in Seoul. Part pageant and part boredom-endurance challenge, it requires participants to repose in silence for an hour and a half, with gentle interruptions every 15 minutes to have their heart rates measured. The winner is the person who achieves the highest combined score on two criteria: lowest and steadiest pulse, along with a highly subjective audience popularity vote.
I entered the competition, in May, because the idea of sitting still for a whole 90 minutes during work hours to win a trophy seemed alluringly transgressive. I was also curious about an apparent contradiction: If I tried to win, wouldn’t I necessarily lose?
30 minutes: 75 b.p.m.
The Space-Out competition was founded in 2014 by a South Korean mixed-media artist known as Woopsyang. In a country known for its long working hours, she felt burned out, even as an artist, and anxious about taking breaks while everyone around her seemed busy. But those people probably also wanted a break, she thought.
“The perception is that time spent spacing out is worthless,” she said. “I wanted to make this time spent spacing out seem valuable.”
Versions of the event have been held in Japan, China, the Netherlands and elsewhere, and people are eager to be silent in any language. More than 4,000 people applied for 80 spots at this year’s Seoul iteration. Organizers selected participants they felt represented a demographic cross section of South Korean society.
Which is not to say my fellow competitors took it as seriously as I did. They included a clown, a guy in a full-body llama costume and the members of a punk band. Many said that the inadvertent spacing out they did in their everyday lives was all the practice they needed.
“Our minds are calm,” said Park Byung-jin, 37, the punk band’s drummer and a technology executive.
My mind was not as I weathered stares from the crowd that controlled my fate. It was racing with advice I had received from a neuroscientist, a psychologist, a Zen teacher and a Buddhist monk.
45 minutes: 64 b.p.m.
Social scientists have examined people’s tolerance for inactivity. In one study from 2014, researchers in the United States asked people to do nothing but sit and think for six to 15 minutes. They thought participants would welcome the break from their busy lives, but many did not.
To determine how restless the participants were, the researchers offered them the option of giving themselves mild electric shocks as a diversion. Sixty-four percent of men and 15 percent of women did so. It wasn’t because they felt tortured by quietude, said Erin Westgate, an author of the study who researches boredom at the University of Florida.
“It was just, they were bored,” she said.
This finding did not bode well for a high-strung person like me.
60 minutes: 63 b.p.m.
Time takes on a disorienting quality when you don’t have anything to do. When a staff member comes to check my pulse, I assume the first 15 minutes have flown by. That wasn’t too bad, I think. Later, I realize this is the base line measurement taken only a few minutes in.
Peter Fransson, a professor of brainstem physiology at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, said that when he has instructed people to do nothing as part of his research, their minds tend to alternate between being in the moment and wandering off.
Do both mental states constitute doing nothing? Does neither do so? It’s hard to say. “To do nothing, from a psychological point of view, is really not a very well-defined state of mind,” Professor Fransson said.
“You zone in and out,” he added. “Maybe if you practice meditation and so on, you can control this to some extent. But I think not all of it is under your control.”
If I wanted a chance at winning, meditation seemed to be the way to go. So on the Thursday before the competition, I contacted Kathy Park, a Zen instructor in Seoul, and asked her to help me perfect the complex ancient practice by Sunday.
Zen meditation is about developing an awareness of yourself and everything around you, through which you understand your true nature, Ms. Park said. In this context, she added, “True ‘do nothing’ is not doing nothing, but rather, you are completely present.”
I wasn’t going to achieve that kind of awareness in 90 minutes. But if I could sit still long enough, Ms. Park said, I might start to notice patterns in my thoughts and gain some insight into my mind.
Junehan, a Buddhist monk at the JustBe Temple in Seoul, urged me to concentrate on my breathing. But I shouldn’t go into the competition intending to win, or even to do nothing, he said, because strong intention leads to attachment.
“If you’re attached to this wanting mind, it gives you suffering,” he said. “When you’re breathing” — he inhaled — “in this moment, there is no wanting.”
Do nothing without trying to do nothing. I understood. Or maybe I’d just been lulled by his implacable placidity into thinking I did.
75 minutes: 69 b.p.m.
As I sit under the bridge, a bug buzzes near my knee and thoughts crowd my mind:
If I could use my phone I could look up what kind of bug that is.
Why did I wear bright red socks today?
Am I doing nothing or just thinking about doing it?
Soon I have what is possibly a metaphysical experience. I am lying down, gazing at a beam of the bridge speckled with circles and dashes. In between my breaths, the pattern reforms into rows of faces, the dashes becoming eyes and the circles mouths.
After thinking in endless loops, this feels like a breakthrough. But what does it mean?
I spend the rest of the competition mulling this. By the time it ends, with the sound of a whistle, I’ve concluded that it might not mean anything.
Final heart rate at 90 minutes: 67 b.p.m.
My pulse has slowed significantly, but I don’t gain enough audience votes to be a finalist. Mr. Park, the drummer, is crowned the winner and given a statue that looks like Rodin’s “The Thinker.”
“I emptied my mind again and again, except for the thought that I had to win,” Mr. Park says, which suggests he was doing something after all. But he appears to have approached the competition with a simplicity that I surrendered in the course of my research. I did too much.
As I watch Mr. Park and the runners-up receive certificates, I feel somewhat ambivalent. I have avoided becoming bored enough to want to give myself an electric shock, but I’m not sure I’ve learned anything either. I don’t even feel particularly well rested.
Essentially, I’ve achieved nothing. Which is its own kind of victory.
Lee Seung-ku contributed reporting.
Yan Zhuang is a Times reporter in Seoul who covers breaking news.
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