Starting Heart Rate: 116 Beats per Minute
Seated cross-legged on a pink yoga mat by Seoul’s Han River, with the gentle spring breeze and distant traffic rumbling over the bridge above, I endeavored to achieve a stone-like stillness.
Several factors complicated this effort—and raised my heart rate: increasing shoulder discomfort, the announcer’s loud commentary, the intense gaze of the crowd, and an evolutionary instinct dating back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors urging me to remain active.
The greatest source of stress was wondering how I measured up against 79 fellow contestants—each silently, expressionlessly, and motionlessly competing to be the best at doing nothing.
This is Seoul’s annual Space-Out Competition. Part contest, part endurance test against boredom, it challenges participants to remain silent for ninety minutes, with brief heart rate checks every fifteen minutes. Victory goes to the one with the lowest and most steady pulse, combined with a subjective audience popularity vote.
I joined the competition in May, intrigued by the rebellious appeal of sitting still for an hour and a half during work hours to win a trophy. I was also curious about a paradox: if I tried to win, would I automatically lose?
30 Minutes In: 75 bpm
The Space-Out Competition was created in 2014 by Woopsyang, a South Korean mixed-media artist. In a country known for long work hours, she felt drained and longed for breaks while everyone around her seemed busy. Yet she suspected those people also desired rest.
“There’s a perception that time spent resting is useless,” she explained. “I wanted to make that distraction time feel valuable.”
Versions of the competition have been held in Japan, China, the Netherlands, and other countries, with people eager to embrace silence in any language. For this year’s Seoul edition, over 4,000 applied for 80 spots. Organizers selected participants to represent a demographic cross-section of South Korean society.
That didn’t mean my fellow contestants took it as seriously as I did. Among them were a clown, a person dressed head-to-toe as a llama, and members of a punk band. Many said their daily involuntary zoning out was sufficient practice.
“Our minds are calm,” said Park Byung-jin, a 37-year-old punk band drummer and tech executive.
My mind was anything but calm as I endured the crowd’s watchful eyes. It raced with advice I had received from a neuroscientist, psychologist, Zen teacher, and Buddhist monk.
45 Minutes In: 64 bpm
Social scientists have studied how well people tolerate doing nothing. A 2014 U.S. study asked participants to sit and think for 6 to 15 minutes, expecting they would welcome a break from busy lives. Instead, many did not.
To gauge their restlessness, researchers offered mild electric shocks as a distraction. Sixty-four percent of men and 15 percent of women chose to receive them—not because the stillness was torturous, explained Erin Westgate, who studies boredom at the University of Florida.
“They were simply bored,” she said.
This finding was hardly encouraging for someone as anxious as me.
60 Minutes In: 63 bpm
Time acquires a disorienting quality when there’s nothing to do. When a staff member came to check my pulse, I assumed the first fifteen minutes had flown by. It had not—it was only a baseline reading taken minutes earlier.
Peter Fransson, a professor of brainstem physiology at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, noted that when people are instructed to do nothing in his studies, their minds tend to alternate between present-moment awareness and wandering.
“Are both states ‘doing nothing’? Or is neither? It’s hard to say. Psychologically, doing nothing isn’t a well-defined mental state,” Fransson said.
“You drift in and out of that disconnection,” he added. “Maybe if you practice meditation, you can manage it to some extent. But I think not everything is under your control.”
If I wanted a chance to win, meditation seemed the best approach. So, the Thursday before the competition, I reached out to Kathy Park, a Zen instructor in Seoul, to help me refine the ancient practice before Sunday.
Zen meditation cultivates awareness of oneself and everything around, leading to understanding one’s true nature, Park explained. In this context, she added, “True ‘doing nothing’ isn’t actually doing nothing, but being fully present.”
I wasn’t going to achieve that level of awareness in 90 minutes. But if I could sit long enough, Park said, I might begin to notice patterns in my thoughts and develop some insight into my mind.
Junehan, a Buddhist monk from Seoul’s JustBe Temple, urged me to focus on breathing but cautioned against entering the contest with the intention to win or even to do nothing, since strong intention leads to attachment.
“If you are attached to the desires of your mind, it causes suffering,” he said. “When you breathe”—he inhaled—“in this moment, there is no desire.”
Don’t do nothing by trying not to do nothing. I understood. Or perhaps his unyielding calm simply made me believe I did.
75 Minutes In: 69 bpm
Sitting beneath the bridge, an insect buzzes near my knee as thoughts crowd my mind:
I may have a metaphysical moment. Lying back, I stare at a beam mottled with circles and lines. Between breaths, the pattern shifts into rows of faces—the dashes becoming eyes and the circles turning into mouths.
After cycling through these thoughts, I consider it a breakthrough. But what does it mean?
I spend the rest of the contest pondering this. By the time the whistle blows, I conclude it might mean nothing at all.
Final Heart Rate at 90 Minutes: 67 bpm
My pulse slowed significantly but I didn’t earn enough audience votes to reach the finals. Park, the punk drummer, was crowned champion and awarded a statue resembling Rodin’s “The Thinker.”
“I emptied my mind repeatedly, except for the thought that I had to win,” Park said, suggesting he was still doing something after all. Yet he approached the contest with a simplicity I lost amid my own overthinking.
Watching Park and the runners-up receive their certificates, I felt ambivalent. I had avoided boredom enough to want an electric shock, but wasn’t sure I had learned anything. Nor did I feel particularly rested.
Essentially, I achieved nothing. And that, perhaps, was its own form of victory.
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