Thinking shouldn’t be a luxury, but it is
I’m starting to pay more just to think.
I’m not paying someone to teach me how to think. Instead, I’m simply spending money to create the conditions where thinking becomes possible. I’ve been paying for silence. Paying to outsource errands. Paying for physical space, not more stuff. All of it, really, is about one thing: making room. So I can have undisturbed, continuous, unbroken hours to think deeply about what matters.
And yet, I still find myself caught in the realisation that my job is my biggest distraction.
Sixteen waking hours a day. Eight of them get claimed by work, that are chewed up by tasks, emails, notifications, admin etc. When I zoom out, it feels absurd: I accomplish a lot in my eight hours at work. I can list it, measure it, and summarise it as achievement. But in the remaining eight hours called life? Not so much. That imbalance has started to ache.
Work is productive. Life feels neglected.
The laundry machine effect
Some days, I feel like I’m in a laundry machine. Work spins me around so fast and for so long that by the time it stops, I’m too dizzy to think clearly about anything else. I need hours just to come back to myself. But by then, it’s bedtime. And in the morning, the cycle begins again.
This isn’t burnout in the traditional sense. It’s not that I hate my work, because I find my work at most times meaningful. It’s that work is colonising my best thinking hours, leaving my life with the leftovers.
And here’s the quiet tragedy: thinking, real thinking, is a muscle. It doesn’t just appear when summoned. It needs time. Attention. Stretches of boredom. And those are exactly what modern life has engineered out of existence.
What if we’ve priced out the act of thinking?
Mary Harrington’s NYT article Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good hits this in a broader way. She writes about how long-form reasoning, deep concentration, and even adult literacy are declining, especially among lower income groups. Elite families are hiring phone-free nannies, sending kids to no-tech schools, and creating fortified attention environments. Everyone else gets TikTok.
It’s not just that people are choosing short-form over long-form. It’s that for some, the long-form is no longer viable. They don’t have the time. The silence. The stability. The boredom. And so the inequality deepens.
We’re entering a world where the ability to focus may define who holds power and who doesn’t.
Slowness, scarcity, and silence
I’ve written before about how we’ve made boredom extinct, and with it, lost imagination and reflection. Or how the pressure to stay up to date with changes can erodes our creative clarity. Or how even over-caring can tip into burnout when boundaries blur.
But this feels like a broader shift. Pursuit is slowing down. Not disappearing, but becoming more selective, more intentional. I see it in myself and around me: friends leaving the city, saying no to promotions, choosing a smaller life with more texture. Maybe what we’re all circling is this. We want to think more about life, and less about work.
Not in an abstract, philosophical way but in a real, embodied, everyday way. What would it take to structure life so that deep thinking wasn’t crammed into the leftover hours?
What I’m doing now
I haven’t figured it out. But I’ve started experimenting.
I track how often I feel disturbed, and what I’m willing to pay to prevent it. I block entire days for slow thinking. Not for output, just for insight. I say no to meetings if they cost me too much recovery time. And I’m trying to protect the mornings and weekends as my sacred thinking territory.
Because the cost of not thinking is higher than it seems. It dulls our sense of what we want. It erodes clarity. It makes us more reactive, more influenceable, more likely to chase someone else’s version of success. When you can’t think clearly, you can’t choose clearly. And that’s the real loss.
And here’s the question I’m sitting with:
What if the real privilege isn’t wealth or status, but time to think clearly?
