— wabisabi of human life
Old newsprint curling
words pile, unused and weightless—
the silence unfolds
This morning I opened the news app on my phone, thumb scrolling without much purpose, and landed on an article about a new roundabout being installed on the outskirts of a small town in northern Switzerland. The photo showed four men in high-visibility vests, arms folded, squinting at a patch of gravel where the old traffic light had once stood. The story itself was breathtakingly uninteresting: construction delays, mild confusion about the signage, a quote from a local councilwoman about “increasing traffic efficiency for the next generation.”
I stared at the photo for a long time, waiting for my brain to care. It didn’t.
But something in the blandness of it all lingered as I drank my coffee, the bitter taste more interesting than the news itself. Why did I even open the app? Why did I read this story—why read any of them? In that moment, a memory from my teens flickered up, as if summoned by the emptiness.
When I was sixteen, I read a self-help book that claimed the world would be better off if more people stopped reading newspapers. The author—a retired businessman, I think, who looked annoyingly content in his dust jacket photo—insisted he hadn’t read the news in decades. “I only scan the headlines,” he wrote. “If something truly matters, it will find its way to me.”
At the time, this seemed both rebellious and deeply irresponsible. How could anyone willingly ignore the world? I was hungry for information, as most young people are, wanting to know everything, everywhere, all at once. I devoured newspapers, magazines, radio, the bottomless forums of the early internet. Each day I built my own mental mosaic of facts and outrage. I knew about airline disasters in Malaysia, election fraud in obscure provinces, a heatwave in southern France. If a starlet tripped on her dress at the Oscars, I knew that too.
But somewhere in those years, a quiet fatigue set in. The headlines blurred together. The stories repeated: disaster, outrage, miracle, repeat. I began to notice how little control I had over any of it, how the news never seemed to resolve—only accumulate, like dust in the corners of a forgotten room.
Looking back, I see it wasn’t just about the news. It was about my brain—our brains—not being evolved for this kind of relentless input. We are built for stories, yes, but stories with endings, characters we might meet, choices that matter. The news, as it is now, is more like weather: constant, changeable, rarely actionable. It left me restless, unable to act but unable to look away.
Over time, I found myself taking the self-help advice, almost by accident. I stopped reading entire articles. I let most headlines drift past. Some mornings, I didn’t check the news at all. And a strange thing happened: I noticed more silence in my days. I felt lighter, less entangled in things I could not change.
But silence, I realized, is not just an absence—it is an invitation. In the quiet, other cravings emerge. My phone became a companion, always offering something: a message, a photo, a new app. Sometimes, late at night, I would catch myself refreshing the newsfeed, searching for stimulation, even as my mind pleaded for sleep.
It took years, and a long detour through distraction and mild compulsion, to understand what was happening. Each notification, each headline, was a hit—a small surge of interest, anticipation, disappointment. I started to see the pattern in myself, and in everyone around me. At the tram stop in Bern, ten people waiting for the Number 9, all eyes on their screens, flicking through their own private weather of news and novelty.
Dopamine, though I didn’t know the word for it then, was the culprit. Not a villain, just a chemical—one that kept me seeking, reaching, never quite satisfied. It wasn’t just the news: it was everything. The urge to check messages, to snack, to scroll, to click. A brain built to forage in forests now lost in an endless field of easy pleasure.
The problem, I learned, was not pleasure itself but the imbalance it creates. Too much seeking, too little stillness, and the baseline shifts. What once brought joy—a surprise letter, a meaningful article, a walk with a friend—starts to feel bland, insufficient. The brain, hungry for more, finds less and less to enjoy.
I began to experiment, almost playfully, with small acts of deprivation. A day without news, a week without social media. A weekend where the phone stayed at home, and I wandered the city with only a notebook and the sound of my own footsteps. The discomfort at first was real, almost physical. I noticed how often my hand reached for the phantom device. I felt, for a while, like I was missing out, falling behind, untethered from the world.
But then, after the withdrawal, something else appeared: a sense of balance. The quiet was no longer empty—it was full. Full of small details, the shape of clouds, the way people spoke in the bakery, the slow drift of afternoon sunlight on the kitchen wall. My mind felt less like a crowded train station and more like a quiet path in the woods.
Of course, there are days when the old compulsions return. Some news stories catch me, pulling me in, and suddenly I am lost again in the endless feed. Sometimes it is a tragedy, sometimes a scandal, sometimes just the dull comfort of seeing the world spin on, as if my own stillness mattered less in the face of so much motion.
But now, I try to greet these moments with a kind of radical honesty. I don’t pretend I am above it. I don’t shame myself for falling into the cycle. I simply notice, share the struggle with friends who understand, and let the craving pass. If anything, I am grateful for the awareness—the chance to see how even the most boring news stories can teach us something, if only about the limits of our own attention.
The truth is, it’s not the headlines themselves that matter, but the rhythms they set in your life. I think back to my teens again, remembering the feeling of needing to know—everything, all the time. My mind was like a radio left on in the background, picking up every signal, every distant storm, static always in the air.
In those days, I used to sit at the kitchen table with my father. He liked his coffee strong, so black it left a sheen on the cup. Sometimes he’d spread out the newspaper and just look at the front page for a long while. I noticed, after a few years, he rarely turned the page. Once, I asked him why.
He shrugged, staring into the cup. “Most of it doesn’t change much. If something important happens, you’ll hear it before you read it.”
At sixteen, I thought that was defeat. Now, I think it was a quiet form of wisdom. There’s only so much noise you can let in before it drowns out everything else.
The habit stayed with me, but it didn’t come easy. I’d catch myself scanning, collecting, consuming—always reaching for one more piece of information, one more little bite of knowing. Sometimes it was the news; sometimes it was food, or a new show, or even the feeling of checking off another task on a to-do list. The brain learns to chase these small rewards, always looking for the next bright thing.
But in the background, a dull ache would form. The more I tried to fill the space, the less it seemed to hold. Joy lost its sharpness. A good meal was just another meal. Even a walk in the park, once so restorative, became a backdrop for restless thoughts: What else should I be doing? What might I be missing?
One autumn in university, I lived in a room just above the tram stop. The trams would come and go all night, their bells marking time, calling out to the city as it slept. I’d wake in the small hours, unable to rest, feeling the urge to reach for my phone, to read or scroll or simply do something, anything, to push away the boredom.
But that boredom—what I once thought of as emptiness—began to feel different as I leaned into it. At first, there was discomfort, the sense that I was wasting time. But slowly, quietly, other things began to happen. I started to notice the way the tram lights made patterns on my ceiling. I could hear the difference between the first and last train, the hollow clang of the late shift and the eager, high-pitched bell of the morning run.
Sometimes I would just sit and watch the window, letting my mind drift. No agenda. No headline. In those moments, a kind of balance would return. The world seemed less hungry, and so did I.
There is a café in Basel I visit when I need to be reminded of this. It’s on a side street, a place with yellowed walls and chipped mugs, where the menu changes but the people do not. Most mornings, the regulars come in, order the same thing they always do, and spend an hour or more simply sitting. Some read, but more often they just watch—people, the weather, the play of light through old glass. There’s an older man who keeps a notebook in front of him, but never seems to write in it. Once, I asked him about it. He said, “I bring it so I have an excuse to be here, doing nothing.”
There is a discipline in that kind of stillness, and I am still learning it.
The most surprising thing about less stimulation is how pain comes up—not dramatic pain, but the small aches you’ve been ignoring. You notice the restless leg, the tightness in your chest, the regrets and unsolved problems you kept at bay with distraction. At first, it feels wrong, like turning up the volume on a song you never wanted to hear.
But, like a muscle stretched after years of neglect, the discomfort softens if you let it be. I learned this on long walks, especially after moving to Bern. Some days I would set out with no goal, just to see where the river went, to notice the city slowly uncurling into spring. The first twenty minutes were always the hardest—my mind would reach for my phone, or invent errands to interrupt the silence. But if I kept walking, something changed. Thoughts came and went, sometimes sharp, sometimes gentle. Old anxieties would surface, but if I didn’t flinch, they’d pass through, leaving a kind of bright emptiness behind.
There were days when I’d walk for hours, come home, and find the world not smaller, but bigger. I could enjoy a cup of tea, really taste it. I could listen to music and feel the notes as they moved through me, not just as background noise. The headlines waited, of course, but they felt smaller too, more manageable, like weather patterns I could notice without stepping outside into the storm.
I sometimes wonder what it would be like to cut away all the stimulation for good—no phone, no news, no screens. I imagine the initial relief, followed by an ache, then perhaps something like real joy. But the world does not allow for easy escapes. Instead, I practice small renunciations—an hour here, a morning there. I build pockets of quiet into my days, like hidden courtyards in the city, places only I know.
There are friends who don’t understand this, who marvel at my “discipline.” They say, “I could never do that. I’d be bored out of my mind.” Maybe they’re right. Or maybe, beneath the boredom, they’d find something else—patience, or even peace.
A Japanese friend once told me the story of monks who sweep the temple courtyard every morning, whether or not it needs sweeping. “It’s not about the leaves,” he said. “It’s about the habit. The discipline. The chance to notice something new every day, even if it looks the same as yesterday.”
That’s what this feels like: a quiet habit, sweeping away the clutter so I can see the stones beneath.
Sometimes, the news finds its way in. The other day, an article about a famous singer’s divorce. Another about a new diet craze. My mind still wants to leap, to comment, to worry. But now, more often, I let the stories go. I picture them as birds at the window: interesting, but not mine to keep.
Instead, I talk with friends about real things—the weather, our families, the taste of bread, the struggle to stay hopeful in a difficult year. These conversations ground me. They remind me that the world is made of small, slow moments, not headlines. Meaning grows out of what we tend and care for, not what we chase.
Sometimes I wonder if my brain misses the chaos—the flood of headlines, the endless list of stories I’ll never finish. But as the seasons pass, I notice something else growing in its place: a patient curiosity. Not the frantic hunger of my youth, but something slower, quieter. An urge to know, but only what is truly mine to know.
One autumn morning, walking along the Aare with the leaves just starting to curl and fall, I passed an old man feeding ducks by the riverbank. He tossed crumbs with a deliberate slowness, waiting for the birds to come to him. He didn’t check his phone. He didn’t rush. I sat beside him, quietly. We watched the river move, the city waking up on the other side. For a long time, neither of us spoke. When he finally turned to me, he said, “They always find the food. You just have to be patient.”
Afterwards, I thought of all the stories I’d missed that day—politicians arguing, celebrities breaking up, experts warning of another crisis. And I realized none of it mattered, not here, not with the river flowing on and the ducks making slow, simple work of breakfast.
That evening, back in my apartment, I made tea and sat at the window. I thought about the pain-pleasure balance the world offers: how every moment of craving or distraction tips us a little further from ourselves, and how every act of sitting with discomfort brings us back. There is no perfect stillness, no permanent escape from wanting—but there is the choice, each day, to make room for a different kind of satisfaction.
Sometimes it’s as easy as sitting for a few minutes before the noise begins. Sometimes it’s a walk with a friend, a cup of coffee savored without urgency, the quiet courage of turning off the screen and letting your mind wander wherever it pleases. These are not grand solutions. They will not change the world overnight. But they change the shape of your day, and in time, the shape of your life.
The longer I live, the more convinced I am that true happiness is not a headline, but a slow accumulation of small, meaningful efforts—facing discomfort, telling the truth about our cravings, building tiny habits of presence and care. We are all, in some way, addicted to noise, but we are also capable of profound quiet.
And so I leave you, reader, with this:
Tomorrow, when the world tries to pull you into its current, let yourself pause. Watch the light on the wall. Listen for the birds. Notice the silence beneath the noise, and see what you find there. Maybe you’ll discover, as I have, that happiness was never about knowing everything, but about caring deeply for the few things that are truly yours.
If this quiet feels familiar—if you, too, are learning to live gently with your own mind—subscribe. I’ll keep writing for those who know that sometimes the most interesting story is the one you’re living now, far from the headlines, in the small spaces where meaning grows.
The news keeps coming, always. The roundabout in Switzerland will be finished, or maybe delayed again. But the world—your world—waits for you in the pause, in the breath, in the patient work of simply being here.
Thank you for reading.
life 