Nowhere to Go

There's a concept in psychology called the sanctuary effect. It reminds me a little of evening study hall back in middle school. Heavy rain outside, thunder rolling, homework I'd never finish, and yet a strange sense of calm. The restlessness would settle. Maybe it was the white noise of the rain, or maybe it was simpler than that: right now I can only sit here in this classroom, there's nowhere else I could go. And it wasn't just the classroom. Staying home on a day of heavy rain or snow does the same thing. I'd settle in, pick a movie, nap, do nothing at all. I don't know where the feeling comes from, whether it's learned or just biology carved into the DNA. When the world outside turns harsh and physical space gets forcibly compressed, you somehow earn a kind of permission to pause. Because there's nowhere to go, the restlessness gets sealed out. Because there's nothing to be done, the social pressure to keep producing, keep evolving, goes quiet for a while under the thunder and the rain.

I get the same feeling on trains, because the moment you roll into a mountain valley the signal drops :)

There's nothing I can do then. I devolve into something primitive, just listening to music or a podcast, staring out at the scenery sliding by, going blank. A few hours pass without my noticing. Or I open the drafts folder I haven't touched in ages and keep working on some half-finished note or thought. AI doesn't work out there, of course, so I'm left with what now looks like a primitive way of writing: tapping out one character at a time. It takes forever to finish a piece this way, but it's far easier to slip into flow, easier to let my mind wander, and sometimes that's exactly what helps me think something through. The urge to create goes through the roof. Most people on the train are doing equally primitive things: reading a paper book, playing cards, doing sudoku on paper, watching a movie, sleeping. There's nothing else to do, and it's precisely that nothing-to-do that lets the brain surface for air.

If I had to sum up the world over the past ten years, since feed products took off, it would be one line: attention is all you need. Short video and AI slice human attention into pieces, the way text gets cut into tokens. Inside a feed, everything you envy, everything you want, everything unfinished, everything you might possibly care about gets pushed at you like a flood. A long article, a long video, a long podcast that needs an hour or two to digest? Don't spend the time, just have AI summarize it. Building a product? Spin it up fast with AI, ship it, move on to the next one. Remember the rules: small steps, move fast, iterate quickly, and if it's not working, run.