I Lost the Ability to Just Be—And So Did Everyone Else

Published: November 26, 2025

I used to be able to sit in simple joy at existence. Not doing anything, not producing anything, not even thinking about anything particularly profound. Just… being.

I could sit on a rock by the river in the Basque Country for an hour and feel the sun move across my skin like it was enough. Nothing missing. Nothing needed.

I don’t remember exactly when I lost that ability, but I know I did. These days, my mornings start with coffee and compulsive scrolling through Google Chrome, hunting for interesting articles. I tell myself I’m looking for writing topics, that I’m being productive. But if I’m honest? I’m just feeding a need for stimulation.

The question that’s been haunting me lately: How much of human activity is actually addiction?

Not addiction in the narrow sense of substance abuse, but as a compulsive dependence on external stimulation to regulate our internal state, to the point where its absence creates distress.

The Uncomfortable Recognition

Here’s what I notice when I try to just sit quietly:

• Restlessness rises almost immediately
• My mind starts generating tasks that “need” to be done
• I watch my hand reach for my phone before I’ve even decided to pick it up
• Even five minutes of stillness feels like a small eternity

This isn’t about lacking discipline. I’ve lived without money, foraged for food in the Basque Country, experienced both extremes of wealth. I know I’m capable of presence when circumstances demand it.

But in normal life? The ability has atrophied.

And here’s what makes this truly disturbing: I think I’m normal. Looking around, almost everyone I know operates in a similar state of constant doing, constant consuming, constant stimulation-seeking. We’ve normalized a condition that should be recognized as pathological.

If you can sit quietly for twenty minutes without agitation or guilt, you are now the weirdo.

The Radical Question

What if the ability to sit in simple joy at existence—the thing I’ve lost—isn’t a luxury or a spiritual achievement? What if it should be ubiquitous, as natural as breathing?

If that’s true, then its rarity becomes a diagnostic indicator. The fact that “just being” feels like a special skill, something requiring retreats and meditation apps and heroic effort, reveals something profound about our collective condition.

We are a civilization of addicts who don’t recognize our addiction because everyone has it.

And this atrophy isn’t accidental. Our attention has become the most valuable commodity in the modern economy. Algorithms are engineered to keep us scrolling, clicking, consuming. The environment itself is optimized to prevent the very stillness we need.

It’s Not Just Dopamine

The easy explanation is neurochemistry: modern life hijacks our dopamine systems with supernormal stimuli. Social media, processed foods, infinite entertainment—all evolutionary novelties our brains aren’t designed to handle.

That’s true. But it’s not the whole truth.

I’ve noticed something else: when I try to sit in stillness, I don’t just feel restless. There’s a voice that says: “You should be doing something useful. Time is passing. The world has problems that need solving. This is wasteful.”

For many people, this voice carries guilt or shame—the fear that rest means you’re lazy, that your worth depends on productivity. Even on sick leave, even living alone without external obligations, I feel the pull: knowing the systemic issues facing our world, feeling I should be doing something about them.

Apparently knowing the world is on fire is the perfect excuse to never let myself feel the warmth of the actual fire in the hearth.

That’s not dopamine talking. That’s cultural programming. That’s the cognitive architecture of a civilization that has lost the framework for valuing being.

The Architecture We’ve Lost

Our ancestors had taxonomies of silence the way we have taxonomies of hustle. They had rituals that turned “not-doing” into the holiest form of doing. We deleted those operating systems and never reinstalled anything in their place.

Traditional cultures had elaborate systems for making stillness meaningful:

• The Sabbath wasn’t just “don’t work”—it was the practice of lighting candles to sanctify time itself, transforming rest from absence into sacred presence
• Buddhist meditation wasn’t vague relaxation—it had detailed maps of the jhanas (stages of concentration) and precise vocabulary for the five hindrances that obstruct inner clarity
• Contemplative Christian practice developed lectio divina (divine reading), a structured method moving beyond textual analysis into wordless communion with the sacred

These weren’t just activities. They were cognitive scaffolding—conceptual frameworks that made stillness as intelligible, measurable, and valuable as achievement.

We’ve dismantled that scaffolding without replacing it.

Now we have rich language for productivity (efficiency, optimization, output, ROI, throughput) but impoverished language for presence. We have clear causal models for doing (work → income → security) but collapsed models for being.

You can’t value what you can’t name, measure, or conceptually justify.

The Trap of Making It a Duality

Here’s where it gets subtle: I’m not arguing for “being vs. doing” as opposing states. That creates a new trap—spiritual bypassing, where stillness becomes just another achievement to optimize.

The real distinction isn’t being vs. doing.

It’s conscious presence vs. unconscious compulsion.

You can scroll social media mindfully (though it’s much harder). You can “meditate” compulsively, turning even stillness into performance. The quality of awareness matters more than the activity.

What I’ve lost isn’t the ability to stop doing things. It’s the ability to do anything—including nothing—with full presence rather than driven compulsion.

Why This Matters Beyond Personal Well-being

This isn’t just about individual mental health or finding inner peace. This is a systems-level crisis.

The challenges we face—climate change, social fragmentation, AI alignment, existential risk—require wisdom, not just intelligence. They require the capacity to:

• Hold complexity without rushing to solutions
• See long-term patterns beyond immediate gratification
• Integrate multiple perspectives simultaneously
• Access insight that transcends clever analysis

You cannot perceive systems well from a scattered, compulsive cognitive state.

The stillness isn’t separate from the work of creating a better world. It’s the foundation that makes such work possible.

Some people say our ancestors didn’t have the luxury of stillness—they were too busy surviving. But that misses the point. Their labor was often integrated with being—seasonal, rhythmic, embedded in a meaningful cosmos. Our crisis is not one of busyness, but of meaningless busyness, of compulsion divorced from purpose.

The Question That Remains

Can I—can we—regain this capacity? Not by returning to some pre-modern innocence, but by building new cognitive scaffolding that makes presence valuable, legible, and practically accessible in modern life?

I don’t have complete answers. But I’m starting to see the architecture of the problem:

We need conceptual frameworks that make stillness intelligible to modern minds. We need causal models that justify it beyond “feeling nice.” We need cultural containers that support rather than punish presence. We need to recognize this as a collective developmental challenge, not just individual weakness.

This is going to require more than meditation apps and wellness retreats. It’s going to require rebuilding the cognitive and social infrastructure that makes being—truly being—possible again.

For now, I’m starting with small acts of rebellion: extending my morning walks, sitting with coffee without my phone, noticing the quality of stillness rather than just its duration.

Not because I’m disciplined. Because I’m beginning to see that the ability to just be isn’t a luxury I’ve lost—it’s a capacity we must not just reclaim, but re-architect for a world that has forgotten how to value it.

Coming Next in This Series

2. Cognitive Scaffolding for Stillness: Why Modern Minds Treat Silence Like a Software Bug
3. From Personal Practice to Civilizational Rehab: Designing Systems That Reward Being Human

What’s your relationship with stillness? If you tried to sit still for 5 minutes today, what was the first “task” your mind invented to make you move? I’m genuinely curious—replies with the subject line “Stillness Report” get read first.