When you’re caught idling in someone else’s holding pattern, the hardest thing to realise is that you haven't lost your edge—you've just been taxing the only things that keep you alive.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from grafting hard, but from revving an engine in neutral.

You find yourself stuck in an environment where the variables are completely out of your hands. Decisions about your future are kicked down the road to some distant calendar milestone; problems you know how to diagnose are met with demands for magic bullets; and the daily routine feels less like building something meaningful and more like an elaborate ritual just to prove you’re awake and at your desk.

When you live like that long enough, two very subtle lies start whispering in your ear:

First, you confuse a suppressed engine with a broken one. Because you aren't allowed to fix the root problem, you quietly assume you’ve forgotten how to solve problems at all. The craftsman starts feeling like a fraud simply because he's been handed a broom instead of his tools.

Second, you slap an internal tax on every single thing that actually restores you.

The 30% Surcharge

Watch what happens when you finally get a spare hour.

Maybe you sit down to tinker with a bit of personal code, dial in the grind on the coffee machine, weed a quiet patch of soil, or sit side-by-side with your kid playing a game. These are tangible, honest things. They have measurable feedback loops, clear cause and effect, and genuine joy. In a healthy human, they are the baseline fuel.

Yet right on cue, a quiet internal voice chimes in with a cold audit:

"Shouldn't you be doing something more practical? Shouldn't you be fixing your life right now?"

Suddenly, the hobby isn't restorative; it carries a 30% guilt surcharge. You aren't fully present with the people you love because you feel you should be producing something; you can’t enjoy tinkering because you feel you’re dodging responsibility.

Marcus Aurelius noted in his journal (Meditations 7.64):

“Whenever you suffer pain, keep in mind that it’s nothing to be ashamed of and that it can’t degrade your guiding intelligence... And in most cases you should be helped by the saying of Epicurus, that pain is never unbearable or unending, so you can remember these limits and not add to them in your imagination. Remember too that many common annoyances are pain in disguise...”

The real pain is the limbo—the structural uncertainty, the friction of an ill-fitting cage. That pain has a natural boundary; it will either resolve itself, change shape, or end.

The added pain—the torment we invent in our own imaginations—is the belief that we ought to be able to fix a broken world that sits five storeys above our reach, and that taking twenty minutes to breathe, muck about in the garden, or tinker is somehow a crime of negligence.

Holding Your Fire

In the old stories, the warrior either charges blindly into the fray or drops his sword in total despair. We rarely celebrate the quiet, gritty middle path: strategic patience.

Recognising that you cannot steer the wind doesn’t mean you’re helpless; it just means you stop burning your own fuel trying to blow into the sails yourself. Keeping your head down while the storm passes isn’t cowardice or apathy. Sometimes, holding your fire and conserving your battery is the single most rational command you can issue from the helm.

When you catch yourself tinkering with some small, seemingly trivial project during an overwhelming week, stop calling it procrastination. Call it what it actually is: routine maintenance.

If you don't service the hull, you won't have a vessel left when the open water finally clears.

Inquiries for the Mental Wilderness

  • Where are you mistaking suppression for inadequacy? Are there areas where you feel "incompetent," but in reality, your hands are simply tied by an environment that rejects the real solution?
  • What is your internal critic taxing? When was the last time you engaged in a hobby, spent time with family, or simply sat idle without an underlying undercurrent of guilt?
  • What does your imagination add to the facts? Separate the structural reality of your current stress from the story you tell yourself about what that stress says about your worth. Where can you set the imaginary burden down and simply wait out the clock?

We have engineered our way out of boredom, trading effort-based happiness for infinite, low-effort pleasure. It is time for me to reset my baseline.

I think I've reached the point in my life where there's a realisation that being 'bored' is a healthy state. As with everything, balance is important, but I think relatively large swathes of time in your day where you've "nothing to do" allow your internal algorithms to calm down and maybe even for something deeper to surface though. If you are reading this rather than scrolling through a feed of content that an algorithm has put before you because it knows you love it, maybe you have too?

I think I'd maybe go further than just having nothing to do and specify nothing 'exciting' to do. I'm taking a pop at cheap dopamine and yeah that includes the 'always on' lifestyle we have now with social media and apps and.. yeah I've turned into my dad. However, what we've done is engineered our way out of being bored, our brain loves it, but it shortcuts the need to think ahead. The 'joy' is on tap, and it's low effort. That sounds great, but it means that the real 'happiness' takes a back seat to instant, infinite, 'pleasure'. It makes the  mundane stuff we need to do in order to make it through life extra mundane, but I find it actually makes what we enjoyed previously as hobbies or pass-times now fall flat. They require 'too much time' or 'too much effort' to provide the same dopamine return as a few taps on our black mirrors does. 

This same mechanism is responsible for many of our human 'vices', it's not just tech. Diet is another manifestation of this problem for me, eating stuff that I enjoy in favour of stuff that I need as fuel. Moderation is required but we've gamed the system against ourselves, and because it's profitable there's a lot of time and effort spent on keeping you plugged in. 

So, to keep myself true and understand how all of this works for me, but also to maybe start to expose my 'journey' (jees that word has so many horrid corporate connotations) so that others can maybe relate and realise they aren't alone, maybe as far as  gathering shared insights. I'm going to start dumping it in a 'public friendly' manner here. And see where we go.