On days with no appointments or defined tasks, I often find myself wandering around the house without direction. I move from room to room, turn my face toward the sunlight in the living room, raise the music a little, pet the cat, and try to relax. Instead, I feel as if I am pressing on my own skin, only to discover that my body does not know how to settle. It is as though something keeps shaking it out of place, making it circle itself in search of a position or a task, however small, that might justify its existence in that moment.
In those empty hours, a simple question creeps in: why does emptiness feel more unsettling than busyness? And why do I sometimes feel that work, almost any kind of work, gives me not only a job, but also direction, meaning, and rhythm?
It is easy to say this is a matter of personality traits: diligence, organization, and preparedness. But I suspect it is more complicated than that, and perhaps linked to a generational experience whose keys I do not hold alone.
I grew up in a country that offers no small certainties and no foundational sense of ease. An entire generation lived through layers of instability: a war that storms into the home, the family, the neighborhood, imposing fragmentation; an economy that oscillates between collapse and waiting; and later lives and professions that require constant vigilance. We are a generation that was not granted the luxury of a reassuring childhood, nor of a slow adolescence, nor even of adult stability. It is as if we reached maturity too early, against our will.
In such environments, the brain learns early on that relaxation is not neutral. Calm can mean that something bad is approaching. Empty time is not a space for rest, but a moment in which what cannot be controlled might slip loose.
I tried to look for answers in psychology and discovered what they call unstructured time anxiety, anxiety linked to time that carries no clear goal. For many, this kind of time is an opportunity to rest. For people like me, it turns into a space that demands alertness and readiness.
Perhaps that is why, over the years, I have evolved into someone constantly on edge. I arrive before my appointments, enter the office before other employees, and wake up before dawn. I love the early sun, and dusk and darkness unsettle me. The end of the day makes me anxious, so I often organize my day as if something might arrive at any moment. There is no rigidity in this, as it may seem, but rather an attempt to give time a direction so it does not remain without a function. For me, readiness has always been a form of safety. It is as if the mind needs to manage the movement of time, not to fully control it, but to avoid being shocked when it suddenly changes course without warning.
Over time, this readiness has become a small source of amusement among my friends. They whisper and laugh about how I arrive before everyone else, how I am the first to show up to any meeting, invitation, or gathering, and how I can be relied on to manage time, presence, and commitment. Some of them, in good faith, even hand me the task of imposing rhythm when chaos takes over. As if this trait has shifted from a personal habit into an unspoken social role.
Sometimes I watch them as they watch me. In the morning, for example, I wake up genuinely alert. I do not need time to ease into the day. I can resume a conversation from the previous night the moment I open my eyes, while Hazem, my partner, and some friends need two hours of silence and coffee before their day begins. Their ability to relax, even to temporarily withdraw from life, amazes me. I silently wonder: what is this ability to suspend time? Why am I always there, present, ready? Where did this need for constant presence come from, even when there is no clear necessity?
Then the profession comes along and reinforces this pattern. Journalism is not just a job, but a state of permanent alert. It is a long training in monitoring events, anticipating them, interpreting them, and getting ahead of them. It is a profession that rewards readiness more than it rewards relaxation. Even when we are not working, we remain in a kind of vigilance. A piece of news may break at any moment, a statement may shift the country’s mood, an image or a piece of information may overturn an entire narrative. In such professions, readiness becomes a neurological baseline, not a conscious choice.
But the cost does not appear during work. It emerges in moments of rest. When there is no direction to head toward, no task waiting to be carried out, the body becomes confused. What should it do? How should it settle? What do these hours mean?
It is not that I do not like rest. I love sunlight, music, coffee, and slow days. But the rest I know does not exist in emptiness. It requires a pleasant purpose, not a complete halt. Perhaps this is where the difference lies between those who rest through disconnection and those who rest through connection.
I sometimes think that an entire generation in this country is facing the same dilemma today. A generation large in numbers but small in safe moments. A generation skilled at readiness and poor at relaxation. A generation that learned how to manage crises but never learned how to live between one crisis and another.
So can such a generation find peace in rest? Is rest for us a stoppage, or a slight deviation in direction? Is the problem in emptiness itself, or in what emptiness reveals about us, about our time, and about a country that never gave us space to truly slow down?
Perhaps this is my generation’s real question. Or perhaps I am trying to brand my generation with something I suffer from alone.
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