On Idleness, Purpose, and the Weight of Nothing

Montaigne, the Blank Page, and the Monsters of Idleness

I’ve decided to take the day off.

It’s a Wednesday, right in the middle of the workweek. I’ve carved it out just for myself—no meetings, no emails, no distractions. Just writing. A full day to dive deep, to explore my mind, to finally put in the hours I’ve been craving. To not just write, but to research myself. To dig.

I start the day right. My morning ritual unfolds as planned: meditation, reading, journaling, gym, then an ice bath to sharpen the senses.

I return to my desk, ready. Focused. Open.

I sit in front of the laptop. I wait.

Nothing.

No idea comes. No subject sticks. I stare. I scroll.

I return to the blank page.

If I wrote about politics, I could write about yesterday’s headlines. If I were an orchid enthusiast, I could research soil types or flowering cycles. But I don’t have that kind of specificity. My writing is more memoir than manual. It draws from my lived experience, from whatever current is running beneath the surface.

But lately, there’s no current. Or at least, no clear direction. The thread is missing.

And in that moment—on a day I gifted to myself—I feel it again. That old ache. The aimlessness. The lack of direction. Not just in writing, but in life.

My work life, too, feels mapped out. I’ve been running the same company for nearly three decades. I know its rhythms, its struggles, its triumphs. But it feels like I’m circling the same ground. Nothing new grows. Nothing challenges or excites.

And when I try to step away, to create space, I expect inspiration. Instead, I meet… nothing.

Michel de Montaigne, in his essay Of Idleness, describes what happens when the mind is given freedom without direction. Hoping for peace, he instead found monsters.

“I found that my mind, instead of finding repose… gave itself more trouble than ever. It brought forth so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, so irregular and without design, that, in order to contemplate their foolishness and strangeness at my leisure, I began to write them down.”

He had stepped back from public life, expecting serenity. Instead, his unoccupied mind turned chaotic. And so he began to write—not from clarity, but from confusion. Not from purpose, but from wandering.

He also wrote:

“The soul that has no fixed goal loses itself; for, as they say, to be everywhere is to be nowhere.”

That line pierces through me. Because that’s where I find myself—nowhere.

Drifting between what I used to do and what I might one day find. My business doesn’t need me the way it used to. My writing lacks a defined thread. I keep showing up, but I don’t know what for.

And maybe that’s the invitation hidden in the fog. To stop looking for the perfect subject. To stop demanding clarity before I begin. Yes, I’m soothed that someone like Montaigne also goes through the same feelings as I do. But that is not enough.

Maybe, like Montaigne, I need to write down the chimaeras. To meet the monsters. To track the drift. And in doing so, allow a new thread to emerge—not from having a purpose, but from honestly naming its absence.

So here I am, again, facing the laptop. Empty. But not entirely.

There’s something forming in the fog.

Maybe that’s where it always begins.