Why Filling Every Gap Empties Your Life
How the spaces between our tasks hold the key to actually experiencing our days
Hi, I’m Claudia and I help you to face a hurried world with greater confidence in your “Power of Slow”.
You are reading the sub-section SlowPOWER of the publication Un-Rush-The Power of Slow where I give you insights on the absurdity of rushing and impulses on how slowing down benefits your life and work.
Don’t be shy to share it with fellow rebels against the hurry culture and click the❤️ button, so more people can discover it on Substack. Thank you!
Why Filling Every Gap Empties Your Life
How the spaces between our tasks hold the key to actually experiencing our days
We want to be productive and tend to seamlessly link our activities to one another without leaving any space in between them. The absurdity is that we try to be efficient so we can gain time and space to enjoy life. Looking forward to the weekend or to the vacation. But life is exactly happening when we allow the small gaps in everyday life to be filled with life. So by the end of each day, you felt, experienced, and were aware.
There are 3+1 aspects to it:
There is a crack in everything that’s how the light gets in. (Leonard Cohen)
Relaxed enjoyment and self-control are not a contradiction in terms
Micro interactions
The cumulative effect
There is a crack in everything that’s how the light gets in
Let’s reframe our relationship with unscheduled moments.
In between everything we do, we need a space to notice things, or let our thoughts wander, or to breathe and ground ourselves, or to relax for a moment, or to allow for micro interactions with people around us who are not part of our work. Instead, we've been conditioned to see those spaces as waste - dead time to be optimized away. But this misses that these seemingly "empty" moments are where life actually unfolds.
Sometimes I get annoyed with myself that I give myself a bit of leeway between tasks/activities and don't jump straight into the next task without interruption. Sometimes, I feel productive that way. But more often I notice that when I do leave some space for thinking, reflecting, moving, chatting, noticing things around me before I take on the next task, I feel, at the end of the day, that I lived. I didn’t miss out on life.
Here is the irony: our culture treats gaps as inefficiencies to be eliminated, when they're actually where spontaneity, reflection, and genuine connection happen. This can be the conversation that happens while waiting for a coffee, or the insight that comes during a commute pause.
When we eliminate gaps, we eliminate the possibility for the unexpected. The overheard conversation that sparks an idea. The moment of boredom that leads to creativity. The unplanned interaction with a neighbor.
Listen to Leonard Cohen. “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”. You realize that these gaps aren't flaws in our system - they're features. They're where insight, connection, and actual experience enter. In the cracks, we're not performing productivity - we're just being present. This is where we actually process our experiences instead of just accumulating them. It's the difference between living through your day and just getting through it.
Relaxed enjoyment and self-control are not a contradiction in terms
Being intentional about creating space isn't lazy or unproductive; it's actually a form of sophisticated self-management.
For a long time, self-control was seen as the golden path to happiness. Those who are disciplined and have self-control lead a contented life - a view that is very American. New studies show that the ability to enjoy seems to be much more important. Does that mean humans have realized that there is a more human way to live, and we go back to “normal life”?
A study by two German psychologists has shown that you need both short-term relaxation and pleasure, but also self-control, to be truly satisfied with your life. And, according to research studies, there is a need for more investigation into how we can improve our hedonism skills - that is to say, how we can learn to indulge in pleasure again. Doesn’t that sound absurd? We have to learn how to enjoy and indulge?
The irony is that some people allow themselves to be distracted from moments of pleasure or relaxation by constantly thinking about the activity they should be doing instead. However, when we fully indulge in pleasure without thinking about anything else, we not only experience greater well-being in the short term, but also have greater life satisfaction in general. We also experience fewer feelings of depression and anxiety.
Instead of seeing pleasure and self-discipline as opposites, we should use both for each other. Finding the right balance in everyday life is crucial.
Micro interactions
Of course, I want to get a lot done by the end of the day and not be distracted talking to the baker when picking up a sandwich or to the taxi driver when rather “use the time” to scroll the news on the phone. But I realized that those short encounters, these micro interactions with people around you, are like the filling between the bricks of a house. Or like the filling between the layers of a cake. They connect the dots in your day, and ultimately, in life.
These short encounters fill your life with stories, care, and humanity.
Here is what makes the idea of seamless efficiency absurd: It looks like we are getting faster (and sometimes we might), but we are getting poorer in human terms. If you dig deeper, we’re not really faster at the end of the day. When everything in your day is on speed dial and steroids, you might have gained some extra time for … (fill in the blank)… to perhaps finally have time to socialize. That very thing you have just unlearned in the process.
Have we lost the art of interacting and connecting with people in daily life? Why are microinteractions between people so important?
It’s important because microinteractions and microrelationships are aspects of social competence. The development of a positive and supportive relationship with different types of people (e.g., parents, siblings, relatives, peers, teachers, co-workers, and other adults) is an important adaptation skill that children and adolescents must acquire in order to live happily in our society.
The short human interactions keep our society intact, your neighborhood friendly, and your soul human.
The cumulative effect
All these individual moments compound to transform your entire experience of living.
Just like small financial investments compound over time, these cracks and spaces in the day, the micro-interactions, and the indulging accumulate into a fundamentally different way of being. One pause might feel insignificant, but a day full of small pauses creates a rhythm that's completely different from the breathless rush most people live in.
When you consistently create small spaces, you stop ping-ponging from one urgent thing to the next. Instead, you're choosing your rhythm rather than being victim to it. These gaps don't just affect the moments themselves - they change how you show up to everything else. The meeting after a mindful walk feels different than the meeting you rushed into. The conversation with your partner after a day of small pauses has a different quality than after a day of relentless efficiency.
You develop a different relationship with time itself. Instead of time feeling scarce and pressured, it starts to feel more spacious and abundant. You're not constantly behind or catching up - you're moving through your day with intention.
By creating these spaces, or cracks or gaps, you're not losing productivity, you're gaining the actual experience of your life that all that productivity was supposed to serve.
Inspiring stuff I compiled for you
Here is a curated list of articles/links on the topic of slowing down and living better.
» The Surprising Health Benefits of Becoming Pope. Or: How a demanding job can be good for the brain and body
» Time Really Does Move Slower When You're Exercising
» Some weeks ago was the first NYT WELL conference on Joy and happiness.
» A doctor’s longevity work revealed simple and practical steps to stay healthy.
» Seeking external validation isn’t just unreliable—it’s actively harmful to your psychological well-being. We’ll never live on our own terms if we live by external validation.
» This author becomes increasingly aware of a word she overuses — that word is ‘should’. She realized now just how destructive the word is.
» The Japanese art of wrapping. ‘Furoshiki’, the Japanese art of wrapping, offers a beautifully enduring and sustainable alternative in a world increasingly driven by speed and disposability.
» The world’s longest train journey is epic — but nobody’s ever taken it. From a sleepy town in Portugal across 13 countries and eight time zones to Singapore.
