Nothing Day

What the day is

National Nothing Day is observed on January 16. It exists to provide one day on which nothing is celebrated, observed or honored, which makes it the only holiday on this site that would prefer you closed the page.

The contradiction is deliberate and has been pointed out since the day was created. A day for nothing is still a day for something, and listing it on a calendar of holidays is exactly the outcome it was complaining about.

Origin and background

The day was created in 1973 by Harold Pullman Coffin, a newspaperman in Nevada, who registered it with the standard reference calendar of events under the name of a nominal National Nothing Foundation. His stated objection was that special interest groups had laid claim to so many dates that the practice had lost all meaning.

He was early. The proliferation he objected to has accelerated enormously since, driven by marketing departments, trade associations and social media, to the point where almost every date carries several competing observances. By that measure the complaint has aged well even though the remedy has not.

January suits it. The date falls after the holidays are over and the new year's resolutions have started to feel like obligations, in the stretch of winter when doing nothing has the most obvious appeal.

How to take part

The instruction is to do nothing, which turns out to be harder than it sounds.

• Do not observe it. Strictly speaking, marking the day defeats it.
• Leave a block of the day unplanned. Not for a hobby or a task, just unallocated.
• Sit without a screen for twenty minutes. Most people find this genuinely uncomfortable, which is informative.
• Let yourself be bored. Boredom has a reasonable claim as the precondition for having ideas.
• Cancel one thing you agreed to and did not want to do.

If doing nothing is impossible on a Friday in January, the day works equally well moved to whenever you can actually take it, which Coffin would probably have accepted.