first sip goes silent—
dopamine still whispering
but nothing lands right
It doesn’t announce itself.
Burnout. Overstimulation. The slow fuzz of too-muchness. It doesn’t come with sirens or red flags. It creeps.
It looks like productivity. Like research. Like staying connected. It dresses up as curiosity, ambition, even care.
You tell yourself you’re just catching up. Just one more scroll. Just one more article. Just one more message to reply to.
You’re good at it. Better than you realize. Gathering dopamine like berries in a forest. Every ping, every click, every tiny red bubble—a soft hit. A little reward. A hit of novelty. You become a collector of fragments.
Then one day the coffee doesn’t taste like anything.
Not bad. Not good. Just… flat.
That’s when I usually know. Not from my sleep, or my thoughts, or even my body. From that cup. The ritual that usually centers me. Suddenly unmoored.
A few years ago, I stayed in a rented room above a ceramic studio in rural Nara. The owner, a man in his seventies who had stopped glazing pottery because he said the silence became too loud, lived below.
Every morning, he would make coffee. One single cup. Always black. Always the same chipped mug.
One morning, I asked him how he knew when the seasons were changing. There had been no shift in weather, no announcement.
He didn’t look up.
“The ants walk differently,” he said. “Faster when the rain comes. Slower when it leaves.”
He paused.
“And the coffee loses its shape in the mouth. Like it wants to be tea.”
It didn’t make sense at the time. It does now.
The body knows. The ritual knows. Long before the mind catches up.
So much of modern living is frictionless. That’s the trap. It allows you to glide right past the red lights inside you. You become so used to being slightly overstimulated that silence feels like a glitch. You start chasing stimulation not for pleasure, but for regulation. You forget what baseline feels like.
And then the coffee goes quiet.
Wabi-Sabi Reminders for the Unplugging Kind:
- The signal to unplug rarely feels urgent. That’s why it matters.
- When simple joys dull, it’s not your fault. It’s your capacity.
- The most dangerous addiction is the one that feels productive.
- Your clarity returns when your input slows.
- Familiar things change shape first. Watch the coffee. Watch the ants.
So I unplug. Slowly. Not with a grand digital detox. But by washing the dishes without music. By walking without my phone. By making one good cup of coffee and doing nothing else until it’s gone.
Because when the taste returns— when the first sip lands again like sunlight through fog— that’s when I know I’m back.
And until then, I rest. I rinse the sponge. I let the noise dissolve.
Not because I’m done. But because I want to be ready when it’s time to begin again
life 
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