Sitting in a plaza somewhere in southern Europe, watching an old man do absolutely nothing, I had one of those realizations that’s embarrassing precisely because it’s obvious: he was better at this than I would ever be.
He wasn’t waiting for someone. He wasn’t killing time before an appointment. He wasn’t scrolling a phone or reading a newspaper or performing any of the small activities we use to justify occupying public space. He was sitting on a bench in the afternoon sun, watching people walk by, and that was the whole thing. That was the activity.
I tried to do the same. I lasted about four minutes before reaching for my phone.
The Vocabulary of Idleness
Different cultures have words for this that English doesn’t. The Italians have dolce far niente — the sweetness of doing nothing. The Dutch have niksen — the act of doing nothing purposefully. The Japanese concept of ma describes the meaningful emptiness between things. Each of these suggests that nothingness isn’t an absence but a presence. A positive state, not a deficit.
English doesn’t have an equivalent. The closest we get is “relaxation,” which implies recovering from something, or “leisure,” which implies doing something other than work. We don’t have a word for the state of simply being without any productive or restorative agenda. Which says everything about the culture that produced the language.
I grew up in a context where busyness was virtue. Not just professional busyness — existential busyness. Every hour should be optimized. Rest was acceptable only as a means to more productive work. Idleness was suspect. If you weren’t doing something, you were wasting something.
Travel dismantled this belief slowly, one plaza at a time.
Where Nothing Gets Done, Beautifully
In parts of the Mediterranean, the afternoon pause isn’t a concession to heat. It’s a structural feature of civilization. Shops close. Streets empty. The day has a caesura built into it, a deliberate break in the rhythm that says: not everything needs to happen right now.
Walking through a Southern European town during this window is an eerie experience if you’re not used to it. The silence feels wrong. Every instinct says you should be doing something — finding a restaurant, checking email, making progress on the afternoon’s plan. But the town has no plan for the afternoon. The afternoon is the plan.
In parts of South America, I encountered a similar dynamic with different texture. The pace wasn’t about withdrawal — it was about presence. Sitting with friends, talking without agenda, letting a coffee stretch into an hour and then another hour. The conversation wasn’t killing time. The conversation was the point. Time was the medium in which relationships were built, and you couldn’t rush it without breaking something.
In Southeast Asia, I watched families spend entire evenings in parks — not exercising, not picnicking, just existing together in open air. Kids running. Grandparents talking. No admission fee, no organized activity, no Instagram-worthy destination. Just people being in a place together.
The Productive Paradox
Here’s what I’ve learned from running an agency across multiple time zones, working with founders who are perpetually overextended: the people who build the best things usually have some version of this practice in their lives. Not meditation retreats or structured mindfulness programs — those are just productivity hacks wearing spiritual clothing. I mean actual unstructured time. Time that doesn’t need to justify itself.
The founders I know who make the clearest strategic decisions tend to have pockets of genuine emptiness in their weeks. A morning with nothing scheduled. An evening without input. Space where ideas can surface without being summoned.
The ones who are scheduled wall-to-wall, who pride themselves on having no downtime, tend to make reactive decisions. They’re not thinking — they’re responding. There’s a difference.
I’m not immune to this. My default is to fill every gap. But I’ve gotten better at protecting empty space, and the returns are disproportionate. The best ideas I’ve had for PipelineRoad, the clearest insights about client strategy, the most useful conversations with Bruno — none of them happened during scheduled work time. They happened in the margins. In the nothing.
What the Old Man Knows
The man on the bench in that plaza had something I’m still learning to cultivate: the ability to be present without purpose. To sit in a public space and watch the world without needing to extract value from it. To let an afternoon be an afternoon.
This isn’t laziness. Laziness is avoidance — the failure to do something you should be doing. What I’m describing is the opposite: the deliberate choice to not do, undertaken with full awareness that there are things you could be doing. It requires a kind of confidence that productivity culture actively undermines.
Some cultures have figured this out. They’ve built it into their architecture, their daily schedules, their language. The rest of us are still catching up, one anxious minute at a time, reaching for our phones on park benches while the afternoon does what afternoons have always done — pass, beautifully, without our help.