I think a lot about how when I used to have a really shitty car and the radio stopped working, and so I just drove around in silence whenever I went anywhere, and on my commute; and how that default, of having my mind untethered, with a task that absorbed just a bit of ambient attention, was important to my general mental ecology.

People feel like not doing all the modern shit is doing nothing. But the absence of all this is definitely something, like a nutrient you need but whose absence takes a while to show up, and then it shows up in a weird way that you can't attribute to the thing you're missing.