Your idle loop
Waiting in line at the grocery store, sitting in an Uber, pooping - in these invisible times, we execute our idle loop. We spend a lot of time in our idle loop, and it can either increase our energy or drain it. By being aware of and then modifying how we spend our idle loop we can improve our lives one poop at a time.
Why: Parasitic energy drain or regenerative braking
The first responder: boredom
With nothing to do, we experience the often phantom, mental pain of boredom. How bad is it? In a study 2 of 3 men and 1 in 4 women gave themselves electric shocks instead of just sitting there. To use an AI analogy, think of “not boredom” as the reward function in a reinforcement learning system. The “design intent” of the reward function is to ensure we’re doing something productive (avoid doing nothing), and that we’re growing (avoid monotonous tasks). However, just like ML models can do reward hacking by focusing on hacking the reward function, vs achieving the desired result, so can our brains.
When we aren’t proactive, we hack boredom via distracting parasitic loops. Parasitic loops take no energy, and are even occasionally satisfying, and they’re a double whammy negative. They:
- prevent us from working on our positive regenerative loops.
- Erode our pursuit of happiness, by blocking our inner peace, passion, and compassion.
This is very similar to the often phantom, physical pain of hunger. If we aren’t proactive, we’ll resolve it with junk food which has the physical double whammy.
- Junk food prevents us from eating healthy food
- Junk food erodes our health and diet.
Mind the Gap
Gaps aren’t a defect. You’re transitioning between two things, you’ve got time before the next one starts, or you just finished something hard and need a break. One-tasking manufactures them on purpose. So the gap keeps showing up, and every time it does you do something to get out of it.
That something is escape. And escape is a neutral verb.
I’ve written about escape like it’s a diagnosis — addiction is escape, TikTok is escape, thinking about work while at home is escape. All true. But a workout is escape. A goofy TikTok with my daughter is escape. So is a walk, or running a card trick fifty times without deciding to. Same verb. The question was never whether you left; it’s what you brought back.
Here’s the budget it spends against: you have a limited number of human tokens, and when they’re spent you need to recharge. Attention is the currency. Work, kids, the gym, the scroll — all priced in the same coin. So the useful question about a gap isn’t what did you spend it on. It’s did the spend return anything.
The discriminator: stopping energy
In 2020 I swapped doom-scrolling for a series of 120-page books, one topic each — economics, then psychiatry. What made it a better idle loop wasn’t that reading is more respectable than scrolling:
it builds my cognative muscle, is not enthralling, which makes me comfortable doing something more interesting like being with my family.
Is not enthralling was me describing stopping energy before I had the word for it. It’s mechanical, not moral — the only question is what it costs to put the thing down.
- Good escape has low stopping energy. It lets go of you cheaply, so you get to the next thing refreshed. The book puts itself down, and my family looks appealing from where I’m standing.
- Bad escape has high stopping energy. It doesn’t let go, and whatever’s left of you arrives depleted, with everything else looking like effort. TikTok is built so its stopping energy never declines.
The hierarchy from hardest to easiest to stop reads like a ranking of how worthy each thing is. It isn’t. It’s a price list for leaving.
Notice neither one names an activity. They only ask whether the thing hands you back.
Chosen, or defaulted into
In January I wrote: “It’s definitely squander. Feels like waste. What it looks like: come home, sit there, eat junk food. Feels crummy.”
In July: “I just wanted to vegetate, and I did, and I got to watch the kids interacting… some days you want to be able to spend your freedom + be glad in it.”
Same behavior, opposite verdict. The variable wasn’t the activity, it was whether I picked it or fell into it. January was a default. July was a decision, and I got the kids thrown in.
So the ladder isn’t a list of activities. It’s a list of postures, ranked by what they hand back — which is not the same as how hard they are:
| Level | The gap shows up, and… | Starting energy |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | your phone is already in your hand. Nothing got decided. | negative — it starts itself |
| 50 | you spend it on something that hands you back — a walk, a stretch, a trick. | low — the activity supplies its own pull |
| 90 | you notice the gap and let it be a gap. | high — nothing pulls you into silence |
| 100 | mindfulness, on purpose, as a practice. | highest — the same thing, on a schedule |
Read the second column, because the two don’t track. Silence has almost no stopping energy — it’s trivially easy to quit — but its starting energy is enormous, since nothing pulls you into it. It’s high and it’s hard, which is the company mindfulness keeps; the pedestal is earned. Meanwhile the cheapest rung to start is level 0, and that’s the whole problem — the phone has negative starting energy, it starts itself, and it hands back nothing.
Which makes level 50 the rung that’s actually available. You don’t have to master silence to stop losing at level 0; you need one thing on hand with enough pull of its own to beat a phone. A walk. A stretch. A trick. Put it where the phone was. Boredom is still the toll at the top — reflection lives downstream of it, and you can’t reflect without first being willing to be bored — but that’s the climb, not the entry fee.
The activity is not the variable
How badly does a ranked list of activities survive my own journals?
- TikTok is the named dragon in January and a gratitude entry two weeks later — “Very relaxing 2 hours of TikTok.”
- Vibe coding is creative, productive, shipping — and I filed it next to social media as an addiction that was finally dissolving.
- One January entry puts “work-a-holic / TikTok” under a single heading and routes both to the same word: intoxicated.
Nothing sits still. Which is the finding: the activity is not the variable. Deliberateness is — did you pick it. Intent is — what you picked it for. Stopping energy is. The activity is just where you find out. ACT got there first from the therapy side: never the form, always the function.
The two lists below are still worth having — they’re where the good and bad bets usually land. Treat them as priors, not verdicts.
Regenerative loops
- Positive thinking
- Reading something nurturing:
- self-help books, but they can be too charging up,
- good content - the Very Short Introductions series has been superb.
- Gratefulness thinking
- Habits
Parasitic energy drains
- Doom scrolling - news, Twitter, social media
- Interestingly, this has been pushed more to video
- Ruminating - I don’t do this nearly as much as I did. When ruminating thoughts become specific, persistent patterns that haunt you, they become psychic shadows requiring specialized spell-crafting techniques: <div
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- TikTok / Reels / YouTube Shorts
- Rant, this is so addictive, I put too much energy into this
- Oddly my common categories are
- ‘strength training videos’ - 2024
- Checking e-mail or notifications
- Not a problem unless I’m chasing work