Who are You Without the Next Thing to Do?
You know that moment when your phone dies and you're standing in the airport security line, suddenly aware of the industrial carpet beneath your socks and the stranger's breathing beside you? That's when the panic hits. Not the big, dramatic kind — the small, insidious dread that whispers you're wasting time, that you should be doing something, anything, to convince the undercover productivity police that you're a good, busy citizen with nothing to hide.
We've become addicts to our own efficiency, mainlining tasks and notifications like they're keeping us alive. Every gap in our schedule feels like a personal failing, every quiet moment an accusation. We've confused motion with meaning, noise with necessity, and somewhere along the way forgot that emptiness isn't absence — it's potential.
Empty space has this inconvenient power of revealing what we've been running from. It strips away the comfortable fiction that we're too busy to feel, too important to sit with what's actually happening inside us. When the external noise stops, the internal noise may become deafening, but not louder than it’s always been.
So we invent distractions. We optimise moments that never asked to be useful. We chase pings and dings like they’re proof we still matter. We treat silence and stillness like dangerous self-indulgences — when really, they might be the only things that could save us from the exhaustion of performing our own lives.
But here's what nobody tells you about space: it's not empty. It's packed. With every feeling you've been outrunning. That churning doubt you call "staying open to possibilities". The panic you rebrand as "being proactive". Space doesn’t manufacture these things — it reveals them. And that moment when you're caught defenseless with your own experience? That's not breakdown. That's breakthrough.
The paradox is that we think we need to fill the space to feel secure, but it's actually the filling that keeps us afraid. When your sense of self depends on constant doing, any interruption becomes a crisis. When your worth is tied to your output, any pause feels like failure. But when you can rest in not-knowing, when you can be friendly with your own uncertainty, you discover a kind of strength that doesn't depend on circumstances.
This isn't about becoming zen or achieving some enlightened state of perpetual calm. It's about developing the capacity to be with what is, without immediately needing to fix it, improve it, or escape from it. It's about recognising that the shakiness you feel isn't a bug in your system — it's a feature. It's your nervous system being honest about the inherent uncertainty of existence.
The most radical thing you can do in a culture obsessed with optimisation is to deliberately choose inefficiency. To sit in your car after you arrive somewhere, just breathing. To eat a meal without entertainment. To walk somewhere without a podcast. To be in line without your phone. Each one is not an act of self-care. It’s a middle finger to the machine that's trying to turn you into it.
When you stop fleeing from space, you discover that emptiness isn't the opposite of fullness — it's the condition that makes fullness possible. You can't appreciate what you have if you're always reaching for what's next. You can't make meaningful choices if you're always reacting to external demands. You can't actually be with someone if you’re constantly putting out fires in your own head.
The space between doings isn't dead time — it's the break that allows you to choose your next move consciously instead of automatically. The silence between conversations isn't awkward — it's the breath that lets you hear what was actually said. The stillness between activities isn't idleness — it's where your next move gets its shape.
So maybe the question isn't how to fill the space, but who we might discover we are when we stop avoiding it. Who are you without the next thing to do? Without the familiar armor of busyness, without the comfortable fiction of indispensability?
This is the most intimate question you'll ever face, and the most necessary.
Because beneath all the managing and performing, there’s something unruly stirring. The unreasonable life that has no interest in your five-year plan. It's the life you glimpse in moments of stillness, silence, practice, pointless beauty, irrational love, making something that doesn’t scale — wild, unmanageable, yours.
The unreasonable life isn’t asking to get on your schedule. It’s waiting for the moment you’re tired enough, honest enough, desperate enough — to stop managing and let it take over.