This means he has a great deal to learn in a relatively short time, given that he is not twenty years old with six decades ahead of him to master it. So from time to time, when I choose not to join him as his first sea woman, I have the rare privilege of being alone.

Do not misunderstand. I love him. I would not exchange him for anything. But these short separations are full of something I can only describe as luxury. I answer to no one. I eat when I want. I sleep as long as I need. The cats and I run the house on our own schedule, which turns out to be no schedule at all. But it works as perfectly as if there was.

Last Sunday at family lunch, my beloved aunt - the mother I always wanted, and I mean that entirely as a compliment to her - looked at me across the table and said it.

“If you get bored, come over and we’ll take care of you.”

I appreciated the invitation. I will go. I always love seeing her.

But bored?

I looked at her, puzzled. These two weeks had been the most productive I can remember in a long time. Next to my work as Head of Communication with a lot of new ideas implemented, I read four books. ’s Stolen Focus. Creative Confidence by the Kelley brothers. ’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being. My favorite? Hari of course! And yesterday I started ’s new book on living a creative life. I took long walks without talking to anyone. I did a full detox: no coffee, no television, no sugar, no carbohydrates, no alcohol. Yoga. My matcha ritual in the morning. Home-made Ice tea instead of Rosé. And, of course, worked on my book. Seems like enough to do. And the freedom was my fuel.

No cold turkey. Which gave me the answer to my question if I am dependent on those things or if I still have my free will.

It felt good. Clarifying, in the way that removing noise always clarifies. The body reset. The mind followed.

The idea that this schedule might produce boredom had, indeed, never occurred to me.

Boredom, it turns out, is not what happens when there is nothing to do. It is what happens when a brain trained on constant stimulation is suddenly asked to sit with itself. The discomfort can be real. But if you let it happen, it is the beginning of something precious.

Do you remember those sweets from childhood - the flying saucers? A thin wafer shell filled with sherbet powder that fizzled and prickled the moment it dissolved on your tongue. That. But in your head. An idea arrives and the head tingles with it. It tends to happen in the quietest moments. Rested. Walking. Daydreaming. The mind not hunting for anything in particular, and suddenly an idea, like lightning, loud and clear. I call it “Kribbeln im Kopf”.

Johann Hari documents what attention researchers have been saying for years. The mind needs unstructured time. Not scheduled relaxation. Not a meditation app with a timer. Genuine, unprogrammed space where nothing is required and nothing is optimized. That is where the default mode network activates. Where unexpected connections surface. Where the idea you didn’t know you had announces itself without warning.

We have systematically eliminated that space.

The phone fills the gap between two thoughts. The podcast or e-book fills the commute. The series fills the evening. Every idle moment is an opportunity the attention economy cannot afford to leave unexploited. Boredom has been engineered out of daily life with extraordinary precision. Not because it is bad for us. Because it is bad for the business model.

The researchers Hari interviewed were unanimous. Creative breakthroughs do not happen during focused work. They happen in the spaces between. The shower. The walk. The half-awake morning moment before the day begins. The two weeks your husband spent learning to sail. So I had my beloved flashcards and textmarkers everywhere. The reading terrace. The bathroom. The kitchen. Flashcards - to me - are an essential tool to connect ideas.

My aunt was not wrong to offer company. She was being kind, as she always is.

But the assumption behind the offer - that alone means lonely, that quiet means boredom, that a woman with a free weekend needs rescuing from it - that assumption is worth examining.

We have confused boredom with rest. We have confused rest with laziness. We have confused laziness with failure. The chain runs fast and mostly unexamined.

Today I am picking Marc up from the airport. I am genuinely happy about this. The cats and I are ready to be a little more social again. The house has been quiet long enough. I’ll put the flashcards into my box. Everything is tidy, clean, organised - as if it had happened on schedule.

I am also arriving at that airport as a slightly different person than the one who dropped him off two weeks ago. Four books. Long walks. A body that remembered what it feels like without the usual noise.

Not bored for a single minute.

Just working. Quietly. On myself.

I wish you a wonderful Sunday.

Next week: most probably… the fox on the road. If there is not another sponaneous idea that’s imposing itself.

Didn’t we all sign up on a social media platform to be informed about how our friends are doing, to stay connected even if they live far away, or to share some insights about our work because we think they might be useful to our readers?

But why, on any given morning, a platform built by some of the most sophisticated engineers in human history decides to show us cat videos instead of the article that might have changed how we think about our work, our investments, or our city?

And why do we stay hooked on those empty posts and reels?

The answer is not complicated. It is just uncomfortable. By now, everyone should know how this works. And yet - we scroll. And scroll. And scroll.

We are more profitable when we are passive.

The Architecture of Distraction

Social media platforms are not neutral conduits of information or connection. They are attention economies - businesses whose revenue depends entirely on how long we remain on their pages. And they have spent billions of dollars - and decades of behavioural research - understanding exactly what keeps us there.

The result is an algorithm that is not designed to inform us. It is designed to retain us.

Cat videos, outrage, nostalgia, controversy - these formats trigger dopamine responses that text-heavy analysis simply cannot match. The algorithm knows this. It has tested it on hundreds of millions of users. And increasingly, the content it serves us is not even created by humans - AI-generated images, synthetic videos, fabricated “relatable” moments - all optimised for engagement and distraction.

We stay longer. We see more advertisements. They earn more money.

Our attention is the product. Our time is the cost.

What stays hidden - the long-form piece, the nuanced argument, the source that would actually make us think - is not hidden by accident. It is hidden because it is less profitable than a video of a golden retriever learning to skateboard.

So if you are posting useful content on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn - over and over again - and wondering why the people you want to reach never seem to see it… now you know. It is not your fault. It’s the algorithms. It might be time to go back to the roots.

The Stoic Response

The Stoics called it the hegemonikon - the commanding faculty. The part of us that chooses where to direct our attention, how to interpret what we perceive, and what we allow to influence our judgement.

Marcus Aurelius wrote that we have power over our minds, not outside events. Epictetus built his entire philosophy on the distinction between what is up to us and what is not.

What is not up to us: the algorithm.

What is entirely up to us: whether we surrender to it. I admit, it is easier said than done. I love cat videos too.

This is not a call for digital asceticism. You can try, of course. I do it regularly and respect some elementary rules like shutting off notifications, leaving the phone in a different room to sleep and a very conscious use of focus or do not disturb time. Changing the email account to fetch or even manual instead of push. It works. I read what I want to read when I am ready to focus on it. And then the sender has my full attention. Because at that time, I am only doing this and nothing else.

So I am not suggesting we delete our accounts, retreat from the world, or pretend that social media does not exist. It does. And it still has the possibility to link us to our friends on Facebook or to share professional insights on LinkedIn. But you never know if what you share is seen by the persons you want to reach. If the algorithm decides, well our content just disappears. Maybe it was too serious. Too critical. Too whatever. Value and control are not the same thing. The algorithm decides what is seen. We only decide what we post.

This is what brings me back to the newsletter. That old-school format - remains, to me, one of the last autonomous acts of information consumption available to us. We subscribe. We choose. We read when we are ready, not when a notification interrupts our thinking. We read on our terms - morning, evening, on a train, with a coffee. We can delay a read without losing it in the thread. And if the content does not serve us, we unsubscribe. No algorithm designed to re-engage us. No feed engineered to pull us back. Simple as that.

It is a small act. And it is ours.

What This Has to Do With Intelligence

In his brilliant - and deliberately provocative - essay The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, the Italian economic historian Carlo Cipolla argued that the truly dangerous people in any society are not the bandits. They are those who act against their own interest while harming others, entirely without awareness. His definition of stupid behaviour is so clear that, once you have read it, you cannot unsee it. And what is worse: you see it more and more.

I think about this when I watch people scroll.

Not because scrolling is stupid. But because the conditions under which we scroll -the manufactured urgency, the engineered reward loops, the invisible curation, the opinions we are made to adopt without a second thought - make it nearly impossible to act in our own cognitive interest. We are not choosing. We are being chosen for.

The question I keep returning to, and that runs through the book I am writing, is this: in an age of unprecedented access to information, are we actually becoming more informed? Or are we becoming more managed? Even more stupid? I have read the research. The answer is not reassuring.

The newsletter does not solve this alone. And I believe we can act against it. That belief is what this book is about.

We decide what enters our minds. When. From whom.

That, in a world designed to take that choice away from us, is not nothing.

This piece is part of an ongoing reflection drawn from my forthcoming book The Fence Climber.