We’ve been conditioned to stay busy. In much of the West, and certainly here in the UK, activity has become a moral signal. If you are not visibly doing something that resembles work, you are presumed to be lazy, unserious, or failing.

Inactivity is suspicious.

This bias runs deep. People are taught to want: security, status, power, recognition. In a culture built on those incentives, doing nothing feels idle. If you are not producing, you are not progressing, and therefore falling behind. So even meaningless action becomes preferable to stillness.

But activity is not proportional to value. Sometimes the most intelligent move is to pause, observe, and refuse to act until thought has caught up. Not all action is progress, and not all inactivity is weakness. Yet culture continues to reward movement over meaning.

The result is a world full of incentives, and very little direction.

• I’ve become increasingly aware of how much of my decision-making is influenced by what the market and the culture around me currently reward.
• The deeper question for me is always whether my effort is driven by my own values, or by inherited incentives like money, status, and comparison.
• Activity without discernment ultimately sustains the status quo rather than advancing it.