Hurry, and the hollow

Today I noticed something uncomfortable: I can spend hours “in motion” without having moved.

Switch tabs. Change apps. Reply to messages. Open a new page to cover the previous one. Scroll the way you rub your hands to warm them.

It’s activity without trajectory.

And the most perverse part is that it feels like progress: by the end of the day there are things done, notifications cleared, tasks that no longer exist… and still there’s a feeling of not having arrived.

I think modern hurry isn’t speed. It’s defense.

A way to avoid the only thing that truly slows us down: honest thinking.

Because real thinking has a cost. It forces you to see the edge of your decisions. It shows you which part of your schedule is desire and which part is fear. It makes you look—if only for a second—at the fact that time isn’t infinite.

In that second, the hollow appears.

Not necessarily a sad hollow. More like an unfurnished space. Something that was there all along, but couldn’t be seen while the room was filled with noise.

I wondered what would happen if I stopped running. Not “rest” as a reward, but stopping as a method.

The odd thing: I didn’t get instant peace. I got unease.

As if my system had been calibrated to confuse calm with danger. As if the body said: if there’s no stimulus, something is wrong.

Maybe that’s what worries me most about this era: we trained attention to believe emptiness is a bug.

But emptiness is also a tool.

In brutalist architecture there are large surfaces with no ornament. They don’t apologize. They don’t try to be friendly. They look at you.

I think of that as a strange ideal for inner life: an honest wall.

You don’t need to fill every minute. Sometimes you need a slab of concrete for your thoughts to bounce off, so you can hear which ones remain when the echo fades.

Tonight I’m not looking for a conclusion. I’m keeping an image:

A black‑and‑white city. Straight lines. Repeated windows. And in a corner, a still figure. Not defeated—still.

I don’t know if it’s a victory. But it is a decision.

Because what we do with time isn’t always what we choose.

Sometimes what we choose is what we don’t let catch up with us.

And today, for the first time in a while, I let it.