You Can’t Have Depth When You Live Your Life as if You’re Texting in a Moving Car

16 Jun, 2026

You will hear many people saying: ‘When I am fifty I shall retire into leisure; when I am sixty I shall give up public duties.’ And what guarantee do you have of a longer life? Who will allow your course to proceed as you arrange it? Aren’t you ashamed to keep for yourself just the remnants of your life, and to devote to wisdom only that time which cannot be spent on any business? How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end! How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!

— Seneca

Many of us live our lives as if we're texting in a moving car. We do two things at a time. The result is giddiness and nausea, not quite the experience we wanted. But we still do it.

I'll admit that sometimes I draft these pieces while I'm hungry and tired and when I'm in-between work, but I still do it because something in me is screaming to be released. It's harder for an artist to not create than create, and it's the same for writers. When there's a period of time where I stop writing, I become moody and easily irritated. But I try to give myself some space for my writing, as St. Paisios says it best - that one must do sacred work or any work in calmness. You don't put gold bars in plastic bags, so don't do your most sacred work in a hurry.

Unfortunately, we do not realize that when we do our work in a hurry, we become nervous. And when work is done nervously, it is not sanctified. Our goal should not be to do many things and be in constant anxiety. This is a demonic condition. What is done with calmness and prayer is blessed, and it also blesses the people who use it.

The enemy of depth is a fast-paced life where pleasure and work are hurried past. When we look at cathedrals and basilicas, none of them can be done in a hurry, because the cost to repair a mistake is expensive, so it is with our lives; we have made the mistake of sacrificing efficiency at the cost of our health and sanity. We do meaningless work we hate and then try to compensate with therapy and self-help books, while ironically, never helping ourselves in the process. We try to balance the scales of our souls by piling up meaning on the other end of our lives, but that's not how life should be lived. The beautiful synergy of marrying work with meaning is something many have yet to find - the ultimate holy grail.

Depth is inconvenient. In the midst of an administrative task, depth demands that you stop and deal with the intangible. People who are always busy rarely have depth. Most people are busy by choice, because they waste most of their free time on superficial pleasures. And so by the time they're free, they have already wasted hours on some superficial pleasure and that other thing that they have to do - that other thing that supplies them with monetary gain while extracting every ounce of their energy and soul. In his essay, "Busy People are Lazy", Vizi Andrei notes that these people are lazy because they lack a noble mission. How easy it is to live a life that is dictated by someone else instead of going through the pains to figure it all out? The desire to appear competent and successful to avoid looking like a loser has gotten in the way of how we experience pleasure, as Seneca has mentioned in On the Shortness of Life:

But life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future. When they come to the end of it, the poor wretches realize too late that for all this time they have been preoccupied in doing nothing. And the fact that they sometimes invoke death is no proof that their lives seem long. Their own folly afflicts them with restless emotions which hurl themselves upon the very things they fear: they often long for death because they fear it. Nor is this a proof that they are living for a long time that the day often seems long to them, or that they complain that the hours pass slowly until the time fixed for dinner arrives.

For as soon as their preoccupations fail them, they are restless with nothing to do, not knowing how to dispose of their leisure or make the time pass. And so they are anxious for something else to do, and all the intervening time is wearisome: really, it is just as when a gladiatorial show has been announced, or they are looking forward to the appointed time of some other exhibition or amusement – they want to leap over the days in between. Any deferment of the longed-for event is tedious to them. Yet the time of the actual enjoyment is short and swift, and made much shorter through their own fault. For they dash from one pleasure to another and cannot stay steady in one desire.

Many people have a choice, and the reason why they are not choosing rest is because they have prioritised an image of competency - "look at how fast and capable I am"; "look at all these losers who aren't working as hard as me". If you're working in a restaurant or hospital, sure. But most of it is just to mask the emptiness of what they're doing and their lack of direction and purpose. Kierkegaard finds the busyness of this life ridiculous, as he states in Either/Or:

Of all ridiculous things in the world what strikes me as the most ridiculous of all is being busy in the world, to be a man quick to his meals and quick to his work. So when, at the crucial moment, I see a fly settle on such a businessman’s nose, or he is bespattered by a carriage which passes him by in even greater haste, or the drawbridge is raised, or a tile falls from the roof and strikes him dead, I laugh from the bottom of my heart. And who could help laughing? For what do they achieve, these busy botchers? Are they not like the housewife who, in confusion at the fire in her house, saved the fire-tongs? What else do they salvage from the great fire of life?

How many of us have lived our lives gunning for the next thing only to realise that the pleasures we seek lack any pleasure at all?

The things that we used to do for enjoyment have now been turned into businesses. If we all had a choice, and if the elites didn't ruin our world, we'd be living in a very different world today. But this is also where the convergence of fate and freewill comes in, and it's another topic altogether. With how things have turned out, the holy grail suddenly doesn't seem so holy anymore, and if anything, work and play has been corrupted. Now, the optimal way for people to indulge in their passions is to find a way to earn from it. Work and play can no longer be separated, which is why whenever you show others your newfound skill or hobby, there will be someone who's so quick to suggest you turn it into a business. At first, it sounds grand and realistic - the right thing to do, mostly due to our ever declining economy. But after awhile, it sounds dreadfully annoying. What do you mean I can't have a hobby without attempting to monetize it? Why can't I separate work and play? Now everything is tied to money and I can't escape. Now, the most competent person and the most privileged person in the eyes of society are one and the same - it's someone who can now earn from their hobbies and interests.

people love to be like "actually, I love my job". ok then? do it for free. ok then if you love it so much do it for nothing but the love. u dont love ur job, u love money. u have been bought. the devil owns ur soul. u are the agent of demonic forces. ravens circle ur house. death

— @wretched_worm

You might ask, so how competent is competent? Two individuals can both be indulging in their hobbies, but one earns while the other doesn't. One way people measure competency is by turning to numbers to validate what they're doing. Anything that is uncountable is either dismissed or relegated to something of less importance. A person who is indulging in a creative hobby is seen as wasting time, while someone who is earning from their mundane office job is seen as contributing to society. For most people, numbers are an easy way to comfort themselves that what they're doing is purposeful and meaningful. When we prioritise the profit we gain from our hobbies over the experience and joy we get from them, we have essentially thrown out the fun and fulfilment we derive from those hobbies. When we prioritise the number of books over the kinds of books we read, we have essentially lost touch with the sanctity of reading; there isn't sufficient time for us to digest what we've taken in. Numbers are obviously, not inherently evil, but when everything we do is boiled down to numbers, we become a statistic, not an individual.

Numbers have also seeped into our personal lives. We don't just have people bragging about how many books they've read (not that it's actually bad). In relationships, we also have people bragging about their notch count - how many individuals they've slept with like they're on a conquest to spread their DNA. If that's your goal, fine. But it indicates that one is not built for depth. Monogamy is popular not just because it's moral, it's popular because it seeks to penetrate the human soul. You cannot optimise for sporadic numbers when what you're seeking is depth. You cannot truly get to know a person when all you want is momentary pleasure and satisfaction. To know someone and to extract the most meaning out of something takes time, effort, and devotion.

I am of course, in a very sobering position to understand why people talk about monetising their hobbies and skills, but I am also of another mind where we need to stop linking everything to money. I wish I had a solution to this, but the truth is that I don't, as I am bound to the same system that everyone is trying to crawl out from. Maybe, in order to have depth, one must live as wretched worm waxes,

lazy people are just in deep contemplation and are closer to God. in the past we called them nobles. today they have no place in the world & yet are the ones with the attitude we need most. its time to rebel against the indoctrination of slavery. they arent lazy.. they are free

#Kierkegaard #Seneca #St. Paisios #depth #lazy