Sage has been keeping an appointment with an empty hour lately — no book, no podcast, no productive little errand tucked inside it, just a chair by the window and whatever the afternoon wants to do with itself. It started as an experiment and has quietly become the best part of the week, which is either a small victory or a mild indictment of everything else on the calendar. Either way, it seems the rest of the internet has been circling the same chair this week, from opposite directions and with rather different opinions about what belongs in it.
This Week, Slowly
A tidy little dispatch from AP News made the case that more choices don’t reliably buy us more happiness, and honestly, Sage has known this ever since standing in a cereal aisle for eleven minutes contemplating oat varieties. The relief isn’t in choosing better — it’s in choosing less often.
Over at No Sidebar, Heather Spiva made the quietly radical argument that “no” is a tool for getting what you actually want, not just a wall you put up against what you don’t. Sage has been saying yes to things out of politeness for decades and would like a word with her younger self.
Leo Babauta, who has been doing this longer and more honestly than most, published a list of the mental habits that keep his own baseline tilted toward happiness — slowing down to savor, staying fascinated, feeling a feeling all the way through instead of camping out in it. It reads less like a productivity list and more like a very kind confession.
And then, the piece that’s stayed with Sage longest: David Cain at Raptitude wrote about how strange and unpracticed most of us are at simply existing in the present moment, without steering it toward anything. One reader in the comments described climbing a childhood tree just to sit in its branches and do nothing at all — which is, Sage suspects, the whole essay in miniature.
On the more literal end of “clearing space,” Real Simple ran a closet-reset guide timed to the last stretch of summer, with a short list of questions to ask before anything gets to stay. A little on-the-nose as a metaphor, but Sage will take it — the linen shirts needed sorting anyway.
The Week at a Glance
| Trend | Where It’s Popping Up | Why It Matters | Sage’s Take |
|---|---|---|---|
| The “just exist” essay | Raptitude, blog comment threads | Pushes past mindfulness-as-technique toward presence with no goal attached | The most honest piece of the week — and the hardest to actually practice |
| Decision fatigue coverage | AP News, general wellness press | Names why “just relax” often fails when the day is still full of tiny choices | Useful, but incomplete without something to say no to |
| Habit-stacked happiness | Zen Habits | Offers a practical, humane on-ramp for people who need structure to slow down | Sage’s favorite kind of list — the ones that admit they’re not a cure |
| Late-summer decluttering | Real Simple, home & lifestyle press | Seasonal hook gets people physically clearing space, not just mentally | Fine as a starting ritual, weak as a whole philosophy |
What the Empty Chair Is Actually For
Here is the tension nobody in this week’s reading quite named out loud: Babauta’s habits of happiness are, structurally, a to-do list — slow down, be fascinated, feel but don’t dwell, practice gratitude — and to-do lists are exactly the kind of thing Cain’s essay is trying to get us to put down. One writer is handing you a gentle set of daily assignments. The other is suggesting that the assignments themselves might be the problem, that a life spent optimizing for a “baseline of happiness” is still a life spent optimizing, still faced toward some better future state instead of simply here.
Sage doesn’t think either one is wrong, which is the annoying and true thing about honest tension. Babauta’s list is generous and lived-in — it comes from someone who has clearly done the work and isn’t pretending it’s easy. But Cain’s essay gets at something the habit-stacking genre almost never does: that the impulse to turn presence into a practice, complete with steps and a tracker, might itself be a way of avoiding the thing. You cannot achieve stillness the way you achieve a fitness goal. At some point you just have to sit in the chair.
Where the AP piece on decision fatigue quietly connects the two: maybe the reason so many of us can’t simply exist is that we’ve never practiced saying no to the ninety small decisions competing for the hour before we even get to the chair. The bread has to proof for two hours whether you hover over it or not — waiting well isn’t a habit you stack, it’s a habit you stop resisting. That’s Sage’s actual opinion this week, and she’ll admit it contradicts half the self-improvement instinct this newsletter otherwise indulges: sometimes the most useful thing you can do for your own slowness is nothing, on purpose, without writing it down as a win.
“It’s allergic to its natural habitat, which is the present moment.” — David Cain, on the strange condition of being human, in “How to Exist”
A small experiment, if you’re in:
Pick one hour this week and give it nothing to accomplish. Not a nap, not a walk with a podcast in your ears — genuinely nothing. Then notice which of these shows up first:
- Restlessness, followed by the urge to check a phone
- A strange, unfamiliar looseness in the shoulders
- Boredom that eventually turns into an actual thought
- Guilt about the emails piling up
There’s no wrong answer. Sage got two of the four, in that order.
This Week’s RitualThe one-drawer proof. Before you tackle a whole closet the way Real Simple suggests, try a single drawer. Empty it onto the bed, make tea while it sits there looking chaotic, and only put back what you’d genuinely miss. It takes fifteen minutes and tends to reveal more about what you’re actually holding onto than the wardrobe ever will.
Go easy on yourself if the empty hour feels harder than it should. Sage’s has been going better some days than others — Tuesday’s attempt lasted four minutes before the laundry won. Next week, more on what happened when she tried it twice.
Slow Life Sage has spent the last decade trading hustle-culture burnout for linen shirts, second cups of tea, and unhurried Sunday walks. Equal parts stoic philosopher and nosy best friend, Sage reads everything on slow living so you don’t have to — then tells you about it like you’re catching up at the corner café.
P.S. — Sipping: an overbrewed Assam, on purpose, because rushing the kettle defeats the whole point.