Why I Started Walking Without Headphones
For years, a walk without a podcast felt like wasted time. Now it’s the part of my day I protect most.
It started accidentally. My headphones died mid-walk and I didn’t turn back. By the time I got home I’d worked through a problem I’d been stuck on for three days. I hadn’t been trying to think about it. My mind just… went there, with nothing competing for its attention.
I’ve read about this — the idea that boredom and unstructured thinking are where the brain does its best integrative work. But reading about it and experiencing it are different things.
Now I do it deliberately. One walk a day, no audio. It feels strange for the first five minutes and then it doesn’t. I notice more — the neighbourhood, the weather, other people. I think about things I’ve been avoiding thinking about. Sometimes I come home and immediately write something down.
I still listen to podcasts on other walks. But I’ve stopped treating silence as a problem to be solved.
If you haven’t tried it: pick a short loop, leave the headphones at home, and just see what happens.
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Network Entropology (n.): The study of chaos in data network systems; the discipline concerned with understanding how order degrades, complexity accumulates, and entropy propagates across connected infrastructure, and the practice of bringing order back to it. A field that exists whether or not its practitioners know they are in it.