Ask almost anyone how they are and the answer arrives instantly.
“Busy.”
Sometimes it is said with a sigh and an eyeroll. Sometimes with a strange sense of pride. Occasionally both reactions at the same time!
Busy has become the language of modern life.
Our calendars are full. Our inboxes refill faster than we can empty them. Meetings bleed into messages, messages bleed into documents, and before long the day has disappeared.
We move constantly.
From one conversation to the next, from one notification to another, from one task to the next demand on our attention. An assumption has crept in: if we are busy, we must be doing something important.
But lately I have been wondering something else – what if busyness is not always about importance and what about if it’s about avoidance?
The fear of empty space
There was a time when moments of silence appeared naturally in our days.
Waiting for a train, sitting in a café alone, walking somewhere without distraction, standing in a queue, even just being on the loo!
Today those moments rarely remain empty for long, the second a gap appears, we reach for our phones. A quick scroll, a message, a news headline, a notification. We fill the silence almost instinctively and it happens so automatically that most of us do not even notice it anymore.
Why?
Why does a moment of quiet feel so uncomfortable that we rush to fill it?
Silence is where thinking lives
Silence creates space for thoughts that do not normally get airtime. When everything is quiet, the mind begins to wander: questions surface, ideas connect, doubts appear, our to-do lists grow as we think about all the things we will do. Sometimes the thoughts are insightful, sometimes they are uncomfortable – challenging even. Which may be why silence can feel unsettling. Being busy protects us from that.
As long as the next meeting is starting, the next email is waiting, or the next scroll is happening, there is no need to sit with those thoughts for very long. We keep moving and movement keeps reflection at a distance.
When the world gets too loud
Maybe we are not just avoiding silence, maybe we are avoiding the sheer volume of everything. The modern world throws a relentless amount at us. News cycles that never stop. Work messages arriving at every hour. Economic uncertainty, political noise, social media arguments, endless opinions about how we should live, work, lead, parent, exercise, eat and exist.
Much of it sits completely outside our control, yet it still demands our attention and emotional energy, and when the world becomes that loud, something interesting happens. We do not necessarily confront it, sometimes we simply keep moving. More tasks, more scrolling, more busyness.
The constant activity can feel easier than sitting still long enough to absorb the weight of everything. Busyness becomes a kind of buffer. A way of protecting ourselves from a world that occasionally feels overwhelming and just a bit shitty.
The cost of constant stimulation
Modern technology has made constant input the default: Messages, updates, notifications, podcasts, videos, feeds and the shitshow news headlines.
Our brains rarely experience a moment without information flowing in. Yet research in psychology and neuroscience has repeatedly shown that insight, creativity and deep thinking often emerge when the mind is at rest rather than actively consuming information. In other words, some of our best thinking happens when we are not trying to think at all. Walking, sitting quietly, looking out of a window, being in the shower…
Moments that look unproductive on the surface are often the ones where deeper understanding begins to form. But it’s these moments are becoming increasingly rare.
The leadership challenge
For leaders this matters more than we might realise. Leadership is not simply about activity, it is about judgement. Seeing patterns others miss, asking better questions, understanding complexity and connecting dots and people. Those abilities do not come from constant motion – they come from reflection.
Yet leaders are operating inside calendars so packed with meetings that there is almost no space left to think. On the days we work from home, even the commute time has disappeared – boom straight into home life.
Decision follows decision, conversation follows conversation, often at a speed that leaves little time to consider whether the right questions were asked in the first place.
In this environment, leadership becomes reactive. Busy replaces thoughtful and speed replaces clarity.
What we might be missing
When silence disappears, subtle things disappear with it.
- Ideas that need time to develop.
- Connections between thoughts that only form when the mind slows down.
- The small moments of insight that change how we see a problem.
- And perhaps something else as well. A deeper understanding of ourselves and the work we are doing.
When we finally sit still long enough, a different set of questions tends to appear.
- Is this meaningful?
- Is this how I want to spend my energy?
- Are we solving the right problems?
These are not questions that surface easily in a world of constant motion.
A quiet rebellion
Perhaps the real challenge today is not productivity, it is our discomfort with silence.
In a culture that celebrates speed, responsiveness and constant activity, choosing to pause can feel almost rebellious.
But silence is not empty, it is where thinking happens, where ideas form, where clarity begins. Where as human beings… we can just BE.
So the next time you find yourself instinctively reaching for your phone to fill a quiet moment, it might be worth pausing for just a little longer. Not doing anything, just sitting with the silence. You might discover that the most interesting thoughts often arrive when everything else finally goes quiet.
Be a good human,
Simone.
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