The Gap Where Ideas Live
Take a train journey without the noise-cancelling headphones
Gather round, you glorious collection of over-stimulated, connection-addicted simpletons. We need to talk about gaps.
Not the kind of gap that appears in your dental records after a particularly harsh winter, nor the dreadful gulf between my expectations and reality, just the boring, empty, lovely spaces in your day.
See, the modern human brain, that soft, wet, easily distracted cauliflower in your skull, needs gaps to function properly. Ideas, those genuinely interesting, slightly off-kilter notions that actually shift things, they don’t arrive when you’re frantically scrolling or absorbing a ten-point summary of the latest financial drivel. They arrive in the quiet, damp spaces when your brain, like a grumpy toddler, has got absolutely nothing better to do.
Think about it. When does a genuinely original thought usually strike? Is it when you’re absorbing a high-octane podcast at 1.5x speed while simultaneously trying to clear your inbox? No, you great lump. It’s when you’re staring blankly at a patchy wall on the Northern Line, or scrubbing some miserable mildew off the shower curtain, or standing in a queue behind a bloke trying to pay for a single onion with shrapnel. These are the moments when your brain’s internal filing system says, “Oh, for God’s sake, fine,” and starts connecting two utterly unrelated ideas just to entertain itself.
But now we have the AI. This magnificent, terrifying engine of gap-filling.
It simply cannot abide a moment of cognitive silence. It offers constant suggestions, endless generation, a torrent of highly polished, perfectly average content designed to occupy every single spare nanosecond of your mental landscape. It’s like having a hyperactive puppy glued to your forehead, barking ‘INPUT! INPUT! INPUT!’ until you feel like you’ll expire from sheer, relentless adequate stimulation.
There is simply no room for boredom. Which, in turn, means there is no room for the weird, sideways thoughts, the ones that feel a bit rude or nonsensical, but which are actually the fertile soil where interesting ideas sprout. You’re trading depth for endless, exhausting surface. You’re swapping the chance of a genuine eureka moment for the certainty of continuous, lukewarm adequacy.
So, you must, and I shudder to recommend anything so wilfully inefficient, create gaps deliberately. Treat them like appointments with your own wretched subconscious.
Take a train journey without the noise-cancelling headphones and the latest dreary podcast; just stare out at the sodden urban sprawl and let your mind go utterly fallow. Take a walk without the phone call; just absorb the grim reality of the pavement and the grey sky. Commit to a morning without inputs, where you sit there, physically, and achieve nothing but a creeping sense of internal dread.
Be bored sometimes. Embrace that minor, squirming discomfort. It’s not wasted time. That, my friend, is where the ideas happen. It’s the necessary, miserable prelude to anything that isn’t just a machine parroting back the internet.