The Art of Doing Nothing, Beautifully

Finding stillness at 66 miles per hour, where the only goal is the temporary suspension of control.

The Optimization Fever

The leather is cold against my neck for exactly three seconds, then it warms up, yielding to the pressure of a skull that hasn’t stopped vibrating for 46 days. Out the window, the world is reduced to a monochromatic blur of slate gray and brilliant white. We are moving at 66 miles per hour, but inside this cabin, the velocity feels like zero. There is no steering wheel in my hands. There is no GPS voice barking about a missed turn three blocks back. There is only the rhythmic, almost hydraulic sigh of the suspension absorbing the imperfections of the mountain road. For the first time since I packed my suitcase, the internal monologue-the one that keeps a running tally of emails, flight delays, and the precise temperature of the hotel pool-has gone silent. I am sitting in the back seat, and for once, I am not the one in charge of the arrival.

We have a sickness, I think. It’s an optimization fever that breaks 106 degrees the moment we set foot out of the office. We treat our leisure time like a secondary startup, a project to be managed with the same frantic KPIs we use to justify our salaries. I see them at the airport, the ‘leisure hackers’ with their 16 different physiological tracking rings and their color-coded itineraries that leave exactly 6 minutes for ‘spontaneous exploration.’ We have become so terrified of a gap in the schedule that we’ve managed to turn the act of resting into a grueling endurance sport. We go on vacation, and we return needing a vacation from the vacation, physically exhausted and mentally fragmented, having ‘achieved’ our itinerary but entirely missed the point of the journey.

Insight: Allergic to the Void

I tried to meditate once. Truly. I sat on a cushion that cost $156 and stared at a wall, but I found myself checking my watch 16 times in what turned out to be a 10-minute session. The silence wasn’t a reprieve; it was a vacuum I felt compelled to fill with thoughts about the laundry or the structural integrity of my retirement fund. It’s the same impulse that makes us pull out our phones when the elevator takes more than 6 seconds to arrive. We are allergic to the void. We have forgotten that the void is where the actual restoration happens. It’s in the ‘nothing’ that the ‘something’ finally has room to breathe.

“

He’d be standing there, surrounded by 36 industrial-sized cans of peaches, and the lack of noise would start to feel like a physical pressure against his eardrums. Most of the crew couldn’t handle it; they’d start whistling or tapping their wrenches just to prove they still existed. But Simon? He’d just lean against the bulkhead and let the stillness wash over him. He called it ‘the deep soak.’

Simon C., Submarine Cook

The Deep Soak

Simon C. understood this better than anyone I’ve ever met. Simon was a submarine cook I knew years ago, a man who spent 126 days at a time in a pressurized steel tube deep beneath the Atlantic. He used to tell me that the hardest part of the job wasn’t the cramped kitchen or the lack of sunlight-it was the weight of the silence when the engines went quiet. He called it ‘the deep soak.’ He told me that if you don’t learn how to be still when the world isn’t asking anything of you, you’ll eventually shatter when it starts asking for everything.

[the deep soak is a luxury we no longer afford ourselves]

I think about Simon C. often, especially when I’m caught in the friction of travel. There is a specific kind of violence in modern logistics-the jarring transitions from security lines to cramped seats, the mental tax of navigating a rental car through a blizzard in a city where you don’t know the names of the streets. We call it ‘adventure,’ but it’s really just high-stakes administration. By the time you actually reach the mountain, your nervous system is so frayed that you spend the first 6 hours of your ‘relaxing’ trip just trying to lower your heart rate. You’re not present; you’re just recovering from the process of getting there.

The Radical Act of Surrender

This is why the act of being a passenger is, in its own way, a revolutionary gesture. When you step into a vehicle and someone else takes the wheel, you are performing an act of radical surrender. You are saying, for this block of time, I am not the navigator. I am not the problem-solver. I am just a physical body moving through space. It is a rare, protected pocket of time where productivity is literally impossible. You can’t fix the traffic. You can’t speed up the snowplow. You are forced into a state of grace, provided you have the courage to actually inhabit it. The drive from the airport to the slopes should be the start of the decompression, not the final hurdle of the stress-test. Using a service like Mayflower Limo changes the fundamental chemistry of the arrival. Instead of white-knuckling the steering wheel over a mountain pass, you’re watching the sun catch the ice on the pines, finally noticing that the sky in the high country is a shade of blue that doesn’t exist at sea level.

The Performance Trap

I remember one particular trip where I spent $676 on a ‘digital detox’ retreat. They took our phones at the door and gave us wooden flutes. It was supposed to be the pinnacle of relaxation, but it was just another checklist. We had to be at ‘Mindful Weaving’ at 9:06 AM and ‘Silent Soup’ at 12:46 PM.

Performance Anxiety (In Minutes)

80%

I spent the whole time wondering if I was doing the silence correctly.

Beauty in the Periphery

There’s a strange beauty in the periphery. When you aren’t focused on the road 16 feet ahead of the bumper, you start to see the world in its peripheral glory. You see the way the wind whips the powder off the peaks, creating these ghostly veils that dance for 6 seconds and then vanish forever. You notice the architecture of the rock faces, the ancient, sedimentary layers that remind you that your ‘urgent’ emails are being sent from a blink in geological time. It’s humbling, and in that humility, there is an immense, heavy peace.

Minutes of Unstructured Observation

The recalibration time needed to recover from high stress.

We deny ourselves this recalibration because we think it’s a waste of time. We’ve been conditioned to believe that every minute must be a brick in the monument of our personal brand. But what if the minutes we ‘waste’ are the only ones that actually keep the monument from toppling over?

Productivity is a parasite that eats the host’s capacity for joy

The Master of Doing Nothing

Navy Service (126 Days)

Engine Noise Required

Small Farm (6 Vegetables)

“Then it would be a job.”

Porch Swing (B-flat)

Master of the art of doing nothing.

Simon C. eventually left the Navy. He bought a small plot of land where he grows exactly 6 types of vegetables. When I asked him why he didn’t turn it into a commercial farm, he looked at me like I was the one who had spent too much time under 156 fathoms of water. ‘Because then it would be a job,’ he said. ‘And I already have enough things that want to be jobs.’ He spends his afternoons sitting on a porch swing that squeaks in a very specific, mournful B-flat. He isn’t ‘meditating’ in the way the apps describe it. He isn’t ‘optimizing his rest.’ He’s just sitting there. He is the master of the art of doing nothing, and he is the most vital person I know.

The True First Class

100%

Steering/Pushing

Responsibility Exerted

There is a profound luxury in being carried. Whether it’s a hawk on a thermal or a passenger in a well-appointed car, the experience is the same: the temporary suspension of the need to exert force. We spend so much of our lives pushing, pulling, and steering. We forget what it feels like to simply be moved. This, I realize, is the true meaning of ‘first class.’ It’s not the leather or the bottled water or the climate control… It’s the permission to be useless.