We've lost the art of doing nothing.
You’re cutting vegetables while Netflix is playing in the background. The metro commute becomes your scroll time for reels. A podcast is the background noise as you walk. You fall asleep to a reel rabbit hole and wake up to unread notifications. We’re always doing something, usually two things at once, and hardly ever doing nothing.
Quietness is foreign to us now. Times that were once silent – waiting areas, taxi rides, supermarket lines, are filled at once with content. Every moment of pause is now a time to consume. The irony is, we refer to it as “killing time,” but time, in reality, is the one killing us quietly – not with quiet, but overstimulation.
So what happened?
It wasn’t always this way. A generation before, they paged through weeklies at the dentist or gazed out bus windows, their minds drifting. Even turning to the back page of a newspaper to read your daily horoscope was a mini ritual – a quirky, soothing thing to do for a few minutes. There was room in the day not taken up by noise, room to let the mind wander, think, or simply sit empty.
Now, that room doesn't exist.
We’re living in a time of plenty, infinite content, 24/7 news, endless scrolling. And though this virtual buffet was created to engage and enlighten, it’s also rendered us allergic to slack. We’ve become so used to being stimulated that the absence of it becomes painful. Waiting without a phone becomes uncomfortable. Quiet feels like something we need to remedy.
But here’s the twist: all this busyness is not making us more contented. In fact, we’re more stressed, distracted, and overwhelmed than ever. We pursue engagement but lose touch, particularly with ourselves. The always-on flow of content doesn’t leave much space for original thought, imagination, or even just emotional reboot.
The fact is, idle time has a deeper function. It’s not holes to be filled – it’s intellectual breathing room. It’s where imagination resides, where thoughts take shape unasked, where unfinished thoughts finally have their say. These breaks allow us to come back to ourselves.
And that’s what we’re lacking. Not merely the quiet, but the self that materializes only in quiet.
So what can we do?
We don’t have to get rid of all our apps or be tech-less. But we can take back small pauses. Attempt to leave your phone in your purse on a lone coffee errand. Observe the world rush by on a train ride rather than observing a screen. Allow a line to just be a line. Allow your brain to be empty, even dull, without scrambling to fill it.
Because perhaps it’s in these ordinary, unfiltered, unsponsored moments that something genuine starts to come back clarity, calm, perhaps even a fresh idea.
We do not miss doing nothing for the fun of it. We miss it because it left space for everything else.