A few years ago, in search of inner peace, I signed up for a Vipassana meditation course: ten days of silence, no phones, no books, no eye contact, and, most horrifyingly, ten hours a day of sitting still.

The goal? Strip away distractions, sit with your thoughts, and transcend suffering. The problem? I took “letting go” very seriously, which is possibly the least enlightened approach.

By day two, my brain had become an over-caffeinated personal assistant, firing off reminders about things I hadn’t thought about in years: unpaid invoices, awkward conversations, a teacher who once said I lacked focus. By day four, I had mentally renovated my imaginary dream house in Japan, complete with minimalist wooden interiors and a garden I would definitely maintain. By day six, I was fantasizing about an emergency that would require us all to leave immediately, ideally via dramatic helicopter rescue.

My legs went numb within the first minutes of every session. Pins and needles crawled slowly up my calves while I tried to breathe like someone enlightened. The meditation hall smelled faintly of incense and floor polish. Someone was always coughing. Someone else shifting their weight. A stomach growled in the silence and sounded obscene. Time didn’t pass so much as expand.

Then, at some point, a guy in my group lost it. He stood up in the middle of a meditation session, shouted “FUCK!” at full volume, and stormed out. The word cracked through the room like something breaking. We weren’t allowed to look at each other, but I felt a small, shameful flicker of relief when the door slammed. He never came back. I understood him.

French philosopher Blaise Pascal once said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” That was in the 1600s, before smartphones, before social media, before infinite distractions. If it was true then, it feels catastrophic now.

There’s a myth that sharks die if they stop swimming. Not entirely true, but some species do need constant forward motion to breathe.

Sometimes, I think people like me are land sharks with passports.

Every time I get too settled, the itch begins. Maybe I should move to Berlin. Or Lisbon. Or Buenos Aires. Surely I’d be more productive there. More creative. More myself. The logic is nonsense. Wherever you go, you still have to deal with yourself. But the belief persists.

Travel is a socially acceptable way to scratch the restlessness itch. If you’re constantly moving, constantly experiencing new things, it feels like achievement. An exciting, Instagrammable way of postponing the moment when you have to sit in a room alone with your thoughts.

Why Doing Nothing Feels Like Failure

The problem isn’t just that we’re restless. It’s that modern life has made stillness feel like laziness.

Somewhere along the way, everything became about optimisation. You can’t just go for a walk, you have to track your steps. You can’t just enjoy a film, you have to watch it with foreign subtitles so you’re learning another language. Even relaxation has been turned into a productivity hack. You’re not resting, you’re recharging.

If you’re not learning, improving, monetising something, what are you even doing?

Even meditation, the literal practice of stillness, has been turned into a competitive sport. There are apps now that rank how well you did nothing. I once saw a guy wearing a T-shirt that said “I HUSTLE HARDER THAN YOU MEDITATE.” I needed to lie down.

Restlessness isn’t abstract. It’s opening your phone in the middle of writing a sentence. It’s checking flight prices for cities you don’t actually want to live in. It’s refreshing your email when you already know there’s nothing there.

Stillness Isn’t a Strategy

While I was failing at stillness, I was also reading about it. Why experience something when you can study it instead?

This led me to Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday, which makes a bold claim: stillness is foundational to creativity, clarity, good decision-making, maybe even happiness.

And while I was very busy highlighting key passages and taking detailed notes, I had the mildly horrifying realisation that I was doing it again. I was working at understanding stillness instead of actually being still.

The idea that stuck wasn’t mystical. It was simpler than that. We don’t compulsively check our phones because we care what’s on them. We do it because empty space feels dangerous. Because if we slow down long enough to listen, we might hear something we’ve been outrunning.

If we never slow down, we just keep moving, mistaking movement for progress.

So… Now What?

I’d love to say that my Vipassana experience transformed me. It didn’t. I went straight back to mindlessly checking my phone, refreshing my emails, and watching epic fail compilations on YouTube.

Stillness remains something I know is valuable but struggle to practice.

Maybe that’s okay. Maybe we don’t need to turn stillness into another productivity goal. Another thing to optimise. Another thing to feel bad at.

But I do think it’s worth noticing the impulse. The urge to refresh. To relocate. To escape. Catching it, even briefly, before obeying it.

Because no matter how many miles you travel, no matter how many new cities you live in, you’re still left with the same quiet room.

And honestly, that might be the hardest journey of all.

*First published in Milk & Honey, Českě Budějovice.