The rules of danger tennis are simple: Hit the ball as hard as you can, and don’t worry about whether it lands in or out. Just swing.
A friend of mine invented danger tennis after noticing during routine matches that our play often became hesitant, tight. We were trying to win points — or at least not lose them — and so our swings and shot placement had become overly cautious.
Switching to danger tennis made the tension magically dissolve. Shoulders relaxed and wrists loose, we could swing as hard as we wanted, and, amazingly, the ball never went out. Crushing forehands and elegant backhands simply flowed off our rackets. We decided we should just play danger tennis all the time.
If only. It turns out you can’t just turn danger tennis on when you need it. Introduce points, spectators, or extraneous thoughts of any kind, and the tension and tics come flooding back.
Like the butterfly of happiness that alights in your hand only if you are not trying to catch it, danger tennis comes only to those who don’t pursue it.
Dating is the same. During my early 20s, I would try hard to convey my own attractive coolness by lingering at coffeehouses with dense volumes of classical Chinese literature casually left open on my table and my motorcycle helmet clearly visible on the seat beside me.
I read ancient Chinese. I ride a motorcycle. Stop and talk to me.
Without exception, the women of San Francisco walked on. My desperate attempts to seem desirable kept me celibate until an intense shift at my restaurant job one evening left me so spent that I managed to stumble into a drought-ending date — one that happened only because I wasn’t trying to make it happen.
Effortless tennis and romantic appeal are not the only goals in life that elude direct, effortful pursuit. Creative insight, humor, trust — even something as basic as sleep — are all things that cannot be forced. The only way to get them is to not chase them directly. You have to try not to try.
Easier said than done. But possible.
We experience wu-wei when we are in contact with things that matter to us.
What Is Wu-Wei?
The paradox involved in trying not to try obsessed the early Chinese thinkers I spent the first years of my career studying. Daoist or Confucian, they all shared the spiritual ideal of wu-wei, or “effortless action.”
Wu-wei is a state of mind where you lose the sense of yourself as an agent and are completely absorbed in what you are doing. You are spontaneous, unselfconscious, and relaxed. As a result, you move through the world with perfect ease, which often amounts to greater success in everything you do.
It thus resembles the idea of flow — a state attained when you stop feeling the effort of a task or activity and lose track of the passage of time. Yet wu-wei is a broader and, in my view, more helpful concept.
Flow, as defined and popularized by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, PhD, demands experiences in which the difficulty and complexity are constantly ramped up. As your skill improves, you require more challenging situations to experience flow so you don’t become bored. Yet, if an activity is too hard, you’ll become frustrated.
Csikszentmihalyi was emphatic about distinguishing true flow from fake versions. Vegging out in front of the TV or getting lost in social media can provide some of flow’s hallmarks, such as loss of self and not noticing the passage of time. Still, these experiences tend to leave us enervated and depressed, not satisfied and relaxed. Doomscrolling is absorbing, but it isn’t flow.
At the same time, there’s a problem with defining true flow in terms of complexity and challenge. While this description fits certain activities, like rock climbing or competitive tennis, it fails to capture the true flow experiences of most people.
This is where wu-wei comes into play. For the early Chinese, the defining feature of wu-wei was that it involved a person living in harmony with the metaphysical order of the universe, which they called “the Way” or “the Dao.”
The equivalent, for modern Westerners who might not believe in a supernatural Way, would be the experience of becoming absorbed in something that is both bigger than you and valuable in your eyes.
That second part is key.
We get into wu-wei when playing with our toddlers because we love them and value spending time with them, not because sitting cross-legged on the floor attending a tea party of stuffed animals is inherently challenging or complex.
We emerge from weeding the garden feeling satisfied and fulfilled because we feel that contact with nature — with growing, living things — is meaningful, and because we take pleasure in our healthy flowers and vegetables getting to spread their roots and breathe freely.
We experience wu-wei when we are in contact with things that matter to us.
We emerge from weeding the garden feeling satisfied and fulfilled because we feel that contact with nature — with growing, living things — is meaningful, and because we take pleasure in our healthy flowers and vegetables getting to spread their roots and breathe freely.
On Not Trying
Great. So, find something that you value. Become absorbed in it. Success and pleasure will follow.
The problem with this advice is that our conscious minds have a habit of getting in the way of spontaneity. The trick of wu-wei is that you can obtain it only if you are not actively trying to do so.
An early Daoist text, the Zhuangzi, has a passage highlighting this tension:
“If you’re betting for pottery tiles in an archery contest, you are perfectly skillful. Raise the stakes to belt buckles and you begin to worry about your aim. Start betting for gold and you’re a complete wreck — you can no longer shoot straight. Your skill is the same in all three cases, but your greed causes you to focus on the external prize. As a general rule, those who value what is on the outside become clumsy on the inside.”
The only way to win the gold is to not want to win the gold. You need to relax into your body and be absorbed completely into the flow of the sport itself, giving your skill space to do its thing. You need to let this activity, one you value for its own sake, take control.
But it’s hard not to think about the gold!
The reason that the fluid, powerful backhands of danger tennis turn into tense, clumsy volleys when playing a regular match is that one is valuing what is on the outside and thereby failing to enter wu-wei.
This is true of both physical and social skills. For the early Chinese, the most important feature of wu-wei was not that it allowed them to shoot well in archery but that it allowed them to win the hearts and minds of other people and move through the social world with effortless ease. People in wu-wei were thought to acquire a charismatic power to attract and influence others.
In contemporary terms, this charisma is what successful politicians possess in abundance and what people trying too hard to find a date — like I did in my early 20s — decidedly lack. You can’t acquire charisma through effort or force of will.
Someone who is trying too hard to be charming is not charming; rather, they seem inauthentic. The only way to avoid this is to engage with the social situation, genuinely listen to the people around you, speak when you have something to say, and remain silent when you don’t. Smile when something is funny, and don’t force it.
The description of the “True Person” in the Zhuangzi portrays this ideal perfectly:
“The True Person of ancient times was proper without being partisan and could ask for help without being obsequious. They were humble without making a display of their humility. Relaxed and at ease, they appeared happy; when they acted, they simply did whatever the situation demanded. Their accumulated attractiveness drew people’s eyes to them; they abided with no ulterior motive, but no one doubted their virtue.”
The incredible amount of information at our fingertips extinguishes the opportunity for spontaneous wandering and chance discoveries.
Effortless Action
So, what do you do if you are not yet a True Person but want to be one? How do you simply “abide,” like The Dude in The Big Lebowski, when in fact you are wracked by social anxiety and desperately want to be liked?
There is no definitive answer, because the problem of trying not to try is a genuine cognitive paradox grounded in the basic structure of the human brain. When you consciously try to relax, you activate the very part of the brain that you want to shut down.
It is like the famous white bear paradox studied by the psychologist Daniel Wegner: If you’re told not to think of a white bear, you will, because the concept has just been activated in your mind. The brain is structured in such a way as to make it impossible to consciously try not to try.
Early Chinese philosophical responses to this paradox varied. Some thinkers proposed practices that might eventually trick you into wu-wei, like counting sheep so you’ll stop worrying about falling asleep. Others focused more on lulling the mind through the body, advocating breathing exercises or sitting in a particular way.
Their crucial shared insight was that spontaneity can only be pursued indirectly. You can create a space for it to come, but you can’t directly pursue it or try to grab it.
More generally, these philosophers recognized that we cannot be fully happy or accomplished human beings unless we embrace this conundrum. We need to learn how to stop pushing when effort is counterproductive.
This ancient paradox provides an urgent insight for us today. Our modern world is built on striving and micromanagement. Over the last decade or so, smartphones and social media have made things immeasurably worse for our peace of mind.
We used to get a little mental downtime as we walked from place to place or stood waiting for a bus. Now even that small island of wu-wei has been squeezed out by a firehose of incessant videos and posts and likes and alerts.
The incredible amount of information at our fingertips extinguishes the opportunity for spontaneous wandering and chance discoveries. Rather than exploring a new place on foot, we read endless reviews of hotels and restaurants and try to maximize every experience.
We are all too often like tennis players anxiously trying to place their shots, overthinking things, cautious and ineffective — and not having much fun.
We have a choice about whether to continue laboring on the treadmill of fruitless effort. We can also choose to step off that treadmill and into the unknown.
Room for Wu-Wei
To my thinking, we could all use a bit more danger tennis in our lives. Of course, if we try too hard, spontaneity will elude us, but this doesn’t leave us helpless. There are ways to make space for spontaneity — or at least to avoid scaring it off.
Recently my partner and I were in Texas, dealing with a challenging family health crisis. We needed a break from sitting in the hospital room and decided to go out for a drink before dinner. My partner got on Yelp to look at reviews of nearby bars but then stopped herself. “Danger tennis!” she said, and I knew immediately what she meant.
We headed to a sketchy but intriguing bar that we’d spotted during the drive to the hospital. It had a faux stone facade, like a castle, and was wedged between a Dunkin’ and a couple of vacant storefronts in a strip mall.
The interior was dark, with a faintly unpleasant odor. We proceeded to get two perfectly acceptable drinks for 10 bucks, win the round of the trivia contest that was in full swing when we arrived, and chat enjoyably with some colorful locals. It was a wonderful time. Yelp would have led us to the bar at the local franchise of a chain Italian restaurant.
Chalk up a win for danger tennis.
This is how cultivating wu-wei looks in daily life: Take a random walk in the woods. Step away from banging your head against writer’s block and have a beer, or play some foosball, or weed the garden or neglected window box.
Send your kids out on their bikes to figure out what to do between now and dinner. Turn and chat with a stranger on the bus instead of staring at your phone. They may be startled and call the police, but then again they may not. Either way, you’ll have done your part to support a comeback for spontaneous conversations.
Another early Daoist text, the Laozi, advises, “Be wu-wei (literally ‘do nothing’), and nothing will be left undone.”
In many areas of life, this turns out to be pretty good advice. We have a choice about whether to continue laboring on the treadmill of fruitless effort. We can also choose to step off that treadmill and into the unknown.
This article originally appeared as “Trying Not to Try” in the July/August 2025 issue of Experience Life.
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