There’s a kind of tired­ness that has noth­ing to do with sleep. You wake up with it already installed. It feels less like exhaus­tion and more like sta­t­ic. Too many tabs open in the mind. Too many unfin­ished ges­tures. Too many tiny nego­ti­a­tions with the day before it has even start­ed. For a while I thought this was just adult­hood. Or work. Or the news cycle. Pick your villain.

Then, a few weeks ago, I read Oliv­er Burkeman’s book Four Thou­sand Weeks. In one chap­ter, his basic claim is dis­arm­ing­ly sim­ple: mod­ern peo­ple don’t mere­ly live in time, we treat time as some­thing like a bud­get or a stor­age unit — some­thing to fill effi­cient­ly, opti­mize, defend from waste. Hours become con­tain­ers. Emp­ty ones feel like fail­ure. Over­full ones feel like guilt. Either way, we’re mea­sur­ing con­stant­ly. Read­ing it, some­thing clicked. Not because it was rev­o­lu­tion­ary, but because it named a back­ground hum I’d stopped noticing.

A few days lat­er I stum­bled across a long piece in Die ZEIT about peo­ple who had spent time in monas­ter­ies. Writ­ers, the­olo­gians, monks. The arti­cle describes the dai­ly rhythm shaped by the Rule of St. Bene­dict: fixed hours for prayer, work, meals, sleep. Bells. Rep­e­ti­tion. The same sequence, every day. And again and again, the peo­ple inter­viewed say some ver­sion of the same thing: the struc­ture doesn’t feel con­strict­ing. It feels reliev­ing. Deci­sions dis­ap­pear. Ener­gy returns. One for­mer monk puts it blunt­ly — the order of time »girds the mind.«

Two very dif­fer­ent sources. A pro­duc­tiv­i­ty-skep­ti­cal jour­nal­ist and a sto­ry about clois­ters. Yet they seemed to cir­cle the same intu­ition from oppo­site sides. It made me won­der if the prob­lem isn’t sim­ply that we have too much to do. Maybe it’s that too many things now hap­pen at once.

Less Choice Can Mean Less Friction

For most of human his­to­ry, dai­ly life was orga­nized less by clocks and more by sequences. His­to­ri­ans some­times call this »task-ori­en­ta­tion«: you do some­thing because the sit­u­a­tion calls for it. The cow needs milk­ing, so you milk her. The field is ready, so you har­vest. The sun sets, so you stop. Not because it’s 18:03, but because the world itself pro­vides the cue. One thing fol­lows anoth­er. Even after clocks took over, we still had rhythms. The train arrives, you board. It’s lunch time, you eat. Shops close, the day ends. The struc­ture wasn’t roman­tic, but it was reli­able. Time came in blocks. You were either here or there.

Now a lot of things over­lap. Work bleeds into evenings. Mes­sages arrive mid-con­ver­sa­tion. Laun­dry runs between meet­ings. Plans are ten­ta­tive because any­one can can­cel at any moment. Your phone turns every idle sec­ond into poten­tial input. Even the sys­tems that used to anchor the day — trains, timeta­bles, sim­ple reli­a­bil­i­ty — feel less depend­able now, so plan­ning becomes a gam­ble. Noth­ing quite starts; noth­ing quite fin­ish­es. Life becomes a stack of half-open tabs. We call this flex­i­bil­i­ty. But flex­i­bil­i­ty with­out form feels less like free­dom and more like low-grade vigilance.

Every time there’s no clear next step, you have to invent one. Decide. Repri­or­i­tize. Check again. It’s not dra­mat­ic stress, just a con­stant trick­le of micro-choic­es. When do I answer this? Should I go now or lat­er? Can I squeeze that in? It’s cog­ni­tive over­head. The kind you don’t notice until you’re tired for no obvi­ous reason.

I can’t prove that this is what makes us anx­ious. Yes, research does link mul­ti­task­ing and fre­quent inter­rup­tions to high­er stress — some­times even in phys­i­o­log­i­cal mea­sures — but it’s not a sin­gle clean cause-and-effect sto­ry. But sub­jec­tive­ly — and anec­do­tal­ly — it fits. The days when every­thing over­laps feel jagged. The days with a sim­ple sequence feel strange­ly calm, even when they’re busy.

Which is where that monas­tic rhythm becomes inter­est­ing, not as a lifestyle fan­ta­sy, but as a psy­cho­log­i­cal clue. The point of the bell isn’t obe­di­ence for its own sake. It’s that you don’t have to nego­ti­ate with your­self all day. The struc­ture car­ries you. The ques­tion »What should I be doing right now?« sim­ply doesn’t arise. Less choice, para­dox­i­cal­ly, can mean less friction.

Bor­row­ing Richard Rohr’s phrase, Burke­man calls the alter­na­tive »deep time«: moments when you stop treat­ing time as some­thing to man­age and start sim­ply inhab­it­ing what you’re doing. Cook­ing feels like cook­ing. Walk­ing feels like walk­ing. A con­ver­sa­tion isn’t com­pet­ing with three par­al­lel threads on a screen. The clock keeps mov­ing, but it stops dic­tat­ing your worth.

Instead of Being Ruled by the Clock, We’re Ruled by Constant Choice

What strikes me is that deep time doesn’t require slow­ness. Monks aren’t lazy. Farm­ers weren’t loung­ing around. You can work hard and still feel unhur­ried — if things hap­pen one after anoth­er instead of all at once. Maybe the real ene­my isn’t speed. Maybe it’s concurrency.

Of course, it would be naïve to roman­ti­cize the past. Medieval life wasn’t serene. Monas­tic rules can become cages. A few peo­ple in the ZEIT arti­cle even left when the struc­tures began to feel restric­tive, when they stopped help­ing and start­ed hold­ing them back. Today, free­dom mat­ters. Flex­i­bil­i­ty mat­ters. No one wants fac­to­ry whis­tles back. But we might have swung too far the oth­er way. We escaped rigid sched­ules only to land in per­ma­nent impro­vi­sa­tion. Instead of being ruled by the clock, we’re ruled by con­stant choice. And con­stant choice is its own kind of burden.

So I’m less inter­est­ed these days in »time man­age­ment« than in rhythm. Not opti­miza­tion, not squeez­ing more in, just a few parts of the day that sim­ply hap­pen. A walk that doesn’t move. Din­ner that doesn’t mul­ti­task. Some­thing that begins and ends with­out nego­ti­a­tion. Lit­tle stretch­es where noth­ing over­laps. Not because it’s effi­cient. Just because it lets you arrive.

Maybe that’s all »deep time« real­ly is: the rare feel­ing of being some­where long enough that you for­get to mea­sure it. In a cul­ture obsessed with flex­i­bil­i­ty, that might be the qui­etest form of resis­tance left.