For modern people engaged in highly cognitive work (development, planning, investment design, and the like), “empty time” is often not a sweet reprieve but a kind of torment. The clever, productivity-hungry brain can’t tolerate a blank stretch of space, so it reflexively reaches for the phone and goes hunting for “easy dopamine.” The result: your head gets overloaded with browser tabs of thought you never closed, and it all spirals into a thick nihilism, or a rerun of your same old anxieties.
So how do you keep the reins on your own day without being devoured by tangled thinking? Borrowing from the lives of great masters like Tolstoy and Haruki Murakami, along with the wisdom of Stoic philosophy, I’ve tried to lay out a way to build a “sustainable governance for daily life.”
1. Don’t Trust Your Willpower: The Masters’ “System of Physical Disconnection”
We often try to lean on our own willpower — “I shouldn’t ruminate,” “I shouldn’t look at my phone when I’m supposed to be resting.” But when the brain is running on empty, willpower fails 100% of the time.
The greatest thing Haruki Murakami and Tolstoy have in common is, paradoxically, that they didn’t trust their own “clever brains.”
Tolstoy’s breakthrough: He spent his whole life thinking, yet fell into nihilism. In the end, he found peace not at his desk but in physical labor — stitching boots with his own hands, plowing the fields.
Murakami’s routine: Once Murakami has written his fixed twenty manuscript pages, he puts down the pen no matter how well the writing is flowing. Then he throws himself, without a word, into running and swimming — physical pain that is 100% within his control — hardwiring into his days a “system of physical disconnection” that forcibly flips the switch of thought to off.
The surest way to stop thinking is to give thought no gap to sneak through — to fill that empty time with “physical action you can control 100% with your own fingertips (leatherwork, an early-morning workout, and so on).”
2. Breaking the Tyranny of Routine: “20% Slack and a Plan B”
The tightly packed routine you built, trusting that the system would save you, can at some point become a new compulsion binding you — the very seed of your anxiety. When you whip yourself with “It’s my routine, so I have to do it,” even on a rainy morning or one where you feel absolutely terrible, a crack eventually opens up — a crack filled with self-justification and guilt.
To dodge this “perfectionist’s trap,” you need Stoic flexibility.
- Treat your condition like “the weather at sea”: Just as a sailor can’t change the weather at sea, this morning’s fatigue or the first tickle of a cold is a “natural external variable” you cannot control 100%. That has to be accepted.
- Allow yourself 20% slack: If you planned to exercise five days this week but made it only four (80%), that isn’t failure — it’s sustainable success. The other 20% of missed days is the “slack” the system absolutely needs in order to breathe.
- Build a case-by-case response algorithm: Instead of the single flat proposition “I go to the gym no matter what,” design a conditional algorithm. (For example: if you’re not feeling well, cancel the gym, and instead sit in the study with a warm cup of tea and spend thirty minutes on leatherwork or jotting in a reflection notebook.) Carrying out a substitute you set up in advance isn’t failure — it’s the successful execution of a “Plan B.”
3. How Should We Handle Intellectual Work That Produces No “Output” (Reading/Studying)?
Unlike leatherwork or coding, “reading” and “studying” don’t yield a clear, tangible product — which makes them easy sources of fatigue and a sense of debt for a productivity-driven brain. There’s no cognitive closure.
The wise resolved this dilemma of “input with no output” in the following ways:
- Tolstoy’s action protocol (converting to action): Don’t stop at consuming print with your eyes. Approach it with the proactive attitude of a miner — “Today I’m going to mine three principles for action that will make my daily life more solid.” Thought that never leads to action is a swamp of nihilism.
- Murakami’s analog cooldown: For Murakami, reading is not an input you have to wring something out of. After finishing intense creation (output) and physical activity, it’s the perfect “analog rest” he places there to block the dopamine-chasing mental chatter that fills empty time.
- Aristotelian text mining (building an output system): As you read, collect the sentences you love straight into Notion, or take a complex line of thought and visualize it with your own symbols and diagrams (“thought drawing”). The very act of pulling thought out of your head and into the world becomes an excellent product, tangible or not, that closes those heavy tabs in your brain.
Conclusion: Stop Thinking and Sense the Present
“When a ship meets a storm, all the sailor can do is lash the sails tight and hold the helm firm. Calming the sea is not the sailor’s job.”
The smarter a person is, the more likely they are to meet, at the end of the maze of thought, the monster called nihilism — “in the end, none of it matters.” But this emptiness is not solved by deeper thinking or sharper logic.
It evaporates only when you fill the skeleton of your day with “concrete actions you can control 100% in this very moment” — breaking a sweat, making something, carrying out a set routine.
Instead of the flawless 100% mirage, keep an 80% solid daily life and 20% breathing room beside you, and I hope you’ll let yourself sink fully into the sensations at your fingertips today.
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