Three and a half years ago, an organisational change ended my C-level role. These things happen. I was not fired dramatically, there was no public fallout, no inspiring pivot story. The structure changed and my position was no longer in it. So I started looking for the next thing — as you do, as everyone expects you to do — and somewhere in that process I saw something I could not unsee. That most of what I was looking for was identical to what I had just left. Different logo, same machinery.
So I stopped looking. And within a few weeks my entire professional portfolio had reorganised itself into three items: take my kid to kindergarten, pay the bills, and take out the trash.
I want to be honest about how that feels when you have spent twenty years being the person with the agenda, the team, the title on the door. It feels, depending on the day, like either the most intelligent decision you have ever made or a quiet unravelling of everything you understood yourself to be. Sometimes both before lunch.
The question I got most — from former colleagues, from family, from people who somehow heard and felt compelled to reach out — was some version of: "So... what are you doing now?" Asked with that particular mixture of concern and curiosity that is really just thinly veiled anxiety on their part about what it means if someone actually stops.
My standard answer was: "Thinking." Which satisfies nobody.
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Here is what I did not expect. I thought the hard part would be boredom. It was not boredom. The hard part was the busyness I invented to replace the real busyness. The podcast on while making coffee. The article opened and not read. The unnecessary errand. The checking of things that did not need checking. I was not resting. I was performing rest while avoiding what rest actually leads to — silence, and whatever silence contains.
Blaise Pascal wrote this in the seventeenth century, and it has not aged a day:
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"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." — Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1670) |
He was not being poetic. He was being clinical. The room is not the problem. The quiet is not the problem. The problem is what the quiet asks once you stop filling it. Questions like: did I actually like that life, or did I like being needed in it? Is this discomfort something to fix, or something to finally read?
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent decades studying what makes people feel most alive. His conclusion was not busyness. It was flow — deep engagement with something that genuinely matters to you. The distinction is sharper than it sounds: busyness is activity without direction. Flow is activity in full alignment with what you actually care about.
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"The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow (1990) |
Most of us, if we are honest, are busy but not in flow. Stretched, yes — but not toward something we chose with full awareness. Toward something we inherited, accumulated, or were told mattered.
Now, at this point you might expect me to tell you I discovered mindfulness. Not quite. Not the kind sold to you in an app with a soothing voice and a fourteen-day free trial. What kept making sense to me was an older idea, one without a wellness industry built around it yet.
In Taoism there is a concept called wu wei — usually translated as non-action or non-striving. Which immediately sounds like an excuse to lie on the sofa. It is not. Wu wei does not mean doing nothing. It means not forcing. Not pushing against the natural state of things. Acting in alignment with what is actually happening rather than what you think should be happening — or what the people asking "what are you doing now" expect to be happening.
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"The Tao does nothing, yet leaves nothing undone." — Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching |
Jon Kabat-Zinn, who spent decades bringing real mindfulness into clinical practice and rescuing it from the incense category, described non-striving as one of its core attitudes. Not non-doing — non-striving. You can be active, engaged, fully present — and still not be striving. The difference is this: striving is when the activity is in service of proving something. To others, to yourself, to the version of you that used to have a title on the door.
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"Non-striving means not forcing things to be other than they are in this moment — including yourself." — Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living (1990) |
I have worked in American companies where busyness is practically a moral virtue. In Europe, people are more refined about it — they take their holidays and still manage to signal ambition in how they describe their weekends. In Turkey, where I grew up, the weight is different: a man without responsibility is a man without seriousness. So we collect responsibilities. We call it identity. And then one day we put them down — by choice or by circumstance — and discover we have no idea what is underneath.
This is not a crisis. It is information. Uncomfortable, socially inconvenient information — but information nonetheless.
The kindergarten drop-off, for what it is worth, I now do without my phone. Not as a discipline. Just because my kid walks away and waves without looking back, the way small children do, completely unbothered by questions of identity and purpose, and I find I would rather watch that than check anything.
It is, I think, the closest I have come to wu wei in daily practice. Doing the small thing, fully, without it needing to be more than what it is.
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This week's insight Busyness is not the problem. Busyness as identity is the problem — because when it stops, by choice or by circumstance, you find out whether there was something underneath it or just more busyness waiting. The goal is not to do less. The goal is to do what you do without it needing to prove something. That turns out to be considerably harder than any job title I have ever had. |