Edited by Maija Utriainen

Passing the time doing nothing in a modern world

It is a Saturday, and I am meant to be “switching off” lying on the grass in my garden. A flock of sparrows that are resident in our garden chirp with piercing acoustic. They flit back and forth between the jasmine that grows up the back of my house and the handfuls of bird seed on the York stone that paves the immediate part of my garden surrounding a pond. 

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Instead, my phone buzzes incessantly. Messages from friends who want to plan things, group chats with constant dialogue, work emails that have not been attended to, and lives of friends not seen for years in a multitude of photos peppered over social media. And then there’s the long application form at the back of my mind that came in the post today demanding I create an account on a painfully slow governmental website. There are also emails from retail brands telling you, you must buy as it is 20% off this weekend only for something you most likely don’t need. I could go on, as there are a plethora of other things that demand our attention on a daily basis, is it a surprise I cannot relax? 

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It's hard to remember when I last let my mind properly wander and my attention was not stolen by some sort of notification or preoccupied by my never-ending list of tasks on my daily to-do list. But sometimes it can be difficult to find the time to truly let your thoughts wander. There have been times when I have felt overwhelmed by all the emails, admin, and tasks I’ve had to complete in a day or a week. I’ve sat at my desk stuck on a problem or task list and made little progress. And we’re often told not to “daydream”. Pay attention, otherwise, you won’t be able to get the impending work in front of you done. This makes sense to an extent, but how long do you fixate on a task whilst no progress is made in the name of trying to be “productive”? 

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Conversely, letting your mind wander can be integral to the development of a problem you’re trying to solve academically (or otherwise) or an idea you’re trying to come up with. Or rather, doing something completely different to the task at hand. It is not ideal to not pay attention during a conversation or constantly let your mind wander, but there is room for carving out time to let

one’s mind wander and simply let time pass which seems seemingly scarcer in a modern world where you try and go for a walk and you’re distracted by your phone or you’re at a restaurant with friends meant to be soaking in the atmosphere, but instead everyone is on their phones “elsewhere” sending a message or checking social media. The point is as Tim Verbimmen a freelance science journalist says, social media fills a void instead of letting your mind wander or simply sitting there and doing nothing to properly process thoughts. Mind wandering is important because it enables you to order your thoughts (Verbimmen, 2022). 

Famous artists, writers, philosophers, and scientists were known for going on long walks to think. Aristotle, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Albert Einstein, and Charles Darwin are just a handful of examples (Oppezzo, 2014). Darwin’s best thinking was said to be done not in his study but in what is known as “Sandwalk”, Darwin’s thinking path. Jean Jacques Rousseau the French philosopher, said on walking “When I stay in one place I can hardly think at all; my body has to be on the move to set my mind going.” (DeSilva, 2021). A study was carried out at Boston’s University of Public Health on walking, 18,766 women were studied in their relationship between cognitive decline and walking. Those who were more mobile or walked more generally had better memory and slower cognitive decline (DeSilva, 2021) Walking is the perfect environment for thought, memory and potentially solving conundrums in unexpected ways. 

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I am not saying we shouldn’t use social media and that always letting your mind wander is a good thing. There are times when paying attention is imperative, such as when you’re looking after a child for example. Your undivided attention is needed in certain situations. But I have realised through my own academic endeavours the importance of ignoring my phone or leaving it in another room for several hours or even just half an hour. It is not easy in a modern world where people expect immediate responses. Some people argue you are maybe bordering on rude if you don’t reply to messages or neglecting work. But we should move away from this rhetoric and instead tell ourselves by letting time pass, letting our mind wander in brief interludes in our lives. We are allowing ourselves time in a busy modern world that always demands our attention and time.

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There is a school of thought that argues if you cannot pay attention because you always let your mind wander, this is a bad thing and there are also people who suffer from psychiatric conditions or mental health problems who simply cannot pay attention. This is a separate issue though in contrast to letting your mind wander to come up with ideas creatively or to just stand back from the bombardment of social media. 

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Time has currency in our modern world, and this is why I mention social media as a distractor of our mind wandering. Huge corporations such as most social media platforms will invest billions in thinking of new ways to take your time away. This is why carving out time in your day to simply go for a walk and do nothing else is so important. 

Next time you let your mind wander to your internal world to process an array of thoughts, consider that maybe it is not such a bad thing after all.