By Zyra Lentija
When was the last time you sat down without reaching for your phone, even for a minute, and felt the urge to fill the silence? Maybe you opened an app without knowing why or refreshed a feed you had just checked, not because you needed anything but because doing “nothing” felt vaguely unbearable.
That instinct crosses generations. Teenagers feel it; parents juggling deadlines feel it; and retirees, finally given “free time,” often experience it as well. We have learned the quiet lesson that stillness seems suspicious. An empty afternoon feels like a waste. A slow day carries a hint of guilt. So, we stay busy, reachable, productive, and constantly “on.”
In this light, silence feels almost irresponsible.
In The Usefulness of the Useless,[i] Nuccio Ordine names this condition with unsettling clarity. Modern culture, he argues, has trained us to value only what is measurable and outcome-driven. He writes, “Everything that does not react to the logic of profit is looked upon with suspicion: it is considered a waste of time, a whim, or even a luxury.”[ii]If something cannot demonstrate immediate utility, such as art, philosophy, and contemplation, it begins to look expendable.
And yet these “useless” things are precisely what make life worth living. When usefulness becomes only a metric, we lose the ability to linger. We skim instead of reading. We rush conversations and pretend to call it multitasking. Life becomes a sequence of tasks rather than something we truly inhabit.
I concretely learned this lesson while working on my licentiate thesis. After discussing a chapter with my adviser, I left his office energized, ready to write that same afternoon. He paused and gave me advice I did not expect (not verbatim): “Don’t rush into writing this. Let it sit with you for a while. Email me after a week, but not within the next few days.” So, what was that all about? My adviser was protecting the gestation of the idea. He understood that clarity ripens; that some form of insight cannot be forced into existence by sheer momentum. Everything in me resisted. Waiting felt like falling behind. But he was right. A week later, the argument had matured. The pause had done its quiet work.
This runs against every modern instinct. We expect replies in minutes and deliveries in hours. The philosopher Josef Pieper would call this a distortion of leisure. In Leisure: The Basis of Culture, he argues that leisure is not mere downtime, but rather a way to return to work refreshed. Rather, it is “a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality.”[iii] It is an inner posture of receptivity, a willingness to attend to the world without trying to dominate it.
Similarly, Kevin Hood Gary maintains in Why Boredom Matters that our constant reach for “digital distractions” prevents us from crossing a necessary threshold. He notes that “the capacity to be bored is a prerequisite for the capacity to be contemplative.”[iv] When we refuse to remain on that threshold, we foreclose the possibility of depth.
The Catholic liturgical tradition embodies this patient wisdom with particular intensity during Holy Week. If Lent is a season of “subtraction,” Holy Week is a school of “staying.” The liturgy does not rush toward the resolution of Easter. On Holy Thursday, gestures unfold with a deliberate, almost agonizing slow pace. On Good Friday, we do not “fix” the tragedy; we kneel before the Cross and remain there.
Then comes the great “nothing” of Holy Saturday. In our world today, Holy Saturday is often treated as a “gap day,” a time to shop for Easter brunch or finish chores. But liturgically, it is the most profound silence of the year. It is the day God is hidden. There is no Mass. The tabernacle is empty. It is a day of absolute non-productivity.
Yet, as the ancient homily for Holy Saturday suggests, “Something strange is happening, there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness.”[v] Nothing is happening outwardly, yet everything is happening inwardly. The Resurrection is not a frantic leap from the Cross; it is a victory that matures in the darkness of the tomb. The liturgy respects the pause. It allows mystery to breathe. In a world obsessed with immediacy, this rhythm is radically countercultural.
The same intuition resurfaces even in contemporary films. In Everything Everywhere All at Once, beneath the frantic motion of infinite multiverses lies a quieter revelation: meaning is found not in endless optimization, but in the “useless” moments of attention: choosing kindness, washing dishes, simply being with another person. Amid chaos, stillness becomes the only path to wholeness.[vi]
Across philosophy, theology, and art, the insight converges: uninterrupted activity does not produce depth. It produces exhaustion. The anxiety to always be “doing” is often a fear of confronting ourselves in the quiet. But movement without stillness becomes noise, and noise eventually wears us down.
My adviser’s counsel years ago was not only about academic writing; it was about the architecture of a meaningful life. Let it sit. Allow time to do its work. Resist the tyranny of immediacy.
We often mistake silence for a void, but it is actually a womb. It is the stillness necessary for anything of substance to take shape. Whether it is the liturgical quiet of a Saturday tomb or the simple act of sitting with a difficult idea or task, we must protect the space where we are not “producing.”
Quiet is not empty time. It is a formative time. The most vital work we do this week, or any week, might be the very thing we are tempted to skip: the act of staying still long enough for the world to catch up with us.
End Notes
[i] The original is in Italian, L’utile dell inutile.
[ii] Nuccio Ordine, The Usefulness of the Useless: A Manifesto, trans. Jonathan Lloyd (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2017), 13. In this part of the book, Ordine articulates the foundational paradox of his manifesto. He argues that the tension between use and uselessness is not merely a semantic dispute but a method for “holding human contradictions in both hands.”
[iii] Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, trans. Gerald Malsbary (South Bend, In: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998), 30. He posits that without the “art of silence and insight,” human beings become “cogs” in a utilitarian machine, leading to the rise of acedia, the spiritual listlessness that Peiper identifies as the “sin against leisure.”
[iv] Kevin Hood Gary, Why Boredom Matters: Education, Leisure, and the Quest for a Meaningful Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 112.
[v] “An Ancient Homily on Holy Saturday,” in the Liturgy of the Hours, vol. 2 (New York: Catholic Book Publishing Co., 1976), 496.
[vi] Everything Everywhere All at Once, directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (Los Angeles: A24, 2022).
References
“An Ancient Homily on Holy Saturday.” In Liturgy of the Hours, vol. 2, 496. New York: Catholic Book Publishing Co., 1976.
Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso, 2013.
“Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. Los Angeles: A24, 2022.
Gary, Kevin Hood. Why Boredom Matters: Education, Leisure, and the Quest for a Meaningful Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Ordine, Nuccio. The Usefulness of the Useless. Translated by Jonathan Lloyd. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017.
Pieper, Josef. Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Translated by Gerald Malsbary. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998. Originally published 1952.
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