A few years ago, I was invited to a conference in a business school. The organizer, with a face glowing from the light of three devices, told me proudly that their speakers would “maximize every minute.”
I remember the lobby – it was a forest of banners and screens. To me, it felt less like an intellectual gathering and more like a marketplace of egos. Even the air itself seemed caffeinated. I asked the organizer, half seriously but politely, if she also maximized her dreams. She didn’t quite catch the irony.
Efficiency has become the new theology and its altar is the hourglass.
We now measure our worth by output. How many words did you write, how many meetings did you attend, how many steps did your watch count, how many episodes did you binge-watch?
Even silence must be monetized. It is called mindfulness these days – packaged and sold in digital courses. Mind you, I have nothing against meditation, but when a pause has to be scheduled, its purity is already lost.
I have spent much of my life surrounded by books and noise – universities, meetings, conferences, libraries. I discovered early that genuine thought rarely visits during activity. It arrives only in the gaps, in the periods when the mind is at rest.
I remember once, while wrestling with a long piece I couldn’t quite finish, I stepped out for a walk through the tree-lined streets of my neighborhood. I didn’t want to think about the article, I wanted to forget it. But somewhere in that small interval of unthinking, the missing link appeared.
I’ve since learned that insight is a courteous guest. It respects those who stop chasing it.
Our age confuses motion with progress. We build apps to record how long we read, as though comprehension were a race. We worship “content creators,” as if creation were an industrial process.
The tragedy is not that we produce so much, it’s that we produce without reflection. The old monastic scholars copied manuscripts slowly, allowing the words to pass through their hands and minds. We scroll. They meditated on meaning; we measure engagement.
The idea that a well-spent hour in silence might be virtuous now feels suspicious, almost decadent. Try sitting in a café without your phone or laptop. You’ll draw the same looks once reserved for eccentrics. But this idleness is precisely what the mind requires.
When I sit quietly amid my home library, I often think of Archimedes in his bath, Newton under his tree, or even our medieval monks who claimed to hear God in silence. Each discovered something precisely because they were not trying to. Again, insight rewards neglect.
Productivity is necessary for survival; reflection is necessary for civilization. The first builds the machine, the second decides what to do with it.
When society exalts only output, it breeds technicians without philosophers, builders without blueprints. The result is impressive speed and magnificent emptiness.
I am not advocating laziness; I am suggesting proportion. Too little reflection produces shallow, forgettable work. Too much invites overthinking, endless drafts and no delivery.
Write your reports, attend your meetings, count your steps if you must. But also allow yourself a useless hour. Read a page twice. Take a long walk without music. Stare out the window until a thought, uninvited and perhaps profound, knocks politely.
When I was younger, I believed knowledge grew through accumulation. Then, I came across this wonderful concept in one of Nassim Taleb’s books called Via Negativa. Now I see it grows through omission, through replacing noise with silence.
Wisdom is not the sum of what we produce, but what we allow ourselves to contemplate.
So when someone asks how much I wrote today, I sometimes answer: Nothing measurable. And that, I think, was my best work of the day.
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