It’s wet, it’s cold, it’s a Sunday. I’ve cancelled my plans. All I want to do is put on a movie, order a burrito and get under a blanket until I can go to bed.
But there are obstacles to my desired cosiness. TV is out of bounds until the end of my month-long abstinence from all forms of nonessential technology.
Taking down Made in Italy, the Italian chef Giorgio Locatelli’s cookbook and memoir, I regret my own austerity in including food-delivery services in this Free Four challenge.
After a quick flick, I land on minestrone. Locatelli promises me that I can’t go wrong with this king of tomato soup and that any vegetables will do, which is good because I don’t have any tomatoes.
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Without the background chatter of my usual cooking-time podcasts, I scrub the mud off some carrots and potatoes in cold water and think back over my day.
I’d gone for a walk, read a book and, in a fug of winter tiredness, messaged my friend Shirley to say I wouldn’t make it to her place in Wicklow that night. She was hosting an evening to remember David, a friend who died.
Shirley replied quickly. Of course, she said. She understood. I was relieved. I was now entirely free to do nothing.
I’ve come to love silence over the past few weeks, or at least I’m not scared of it any more. Until very recently, I’d scroll on Instagram to disengage. Now my energy seems to renew in the quiet.
Allowing time for the brain to be idle is as important for our brains as sleep, says professor Ian Robertson, a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist.
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“If our brains are always ‘on’, this inhibits the circuits of the brain where important ‘backroom’ work is done, like storing memories, solving problems, daydreaming possibilities,” says Robertson. Keeping our brains always on, always consuming information, is bad for our cognitive function, our emotional health and over time it weakens our ability to focus.
I’m dicing a fourth carrot when I realise I have somewhere to be. I’d had these plans with Shirley for weeks. I had cordoned off the time. Why was I overvaluing my tiredness and undervaluing being there for someone I love?
If there had been no way to get in touch with her, would I have just stood her up? Never. Is cancelling a few hours in advance any better? I’m not so sure.
I leave Locatelli for another day, and as I drive the hour to Shirley’s, I think about David. Our paths crossed a few months before he died in the summer of 2025. I knew him as an extremely kind, gentle person, with green thumbs and a passion for sauna.
When he came to an event I was speaking at in the spring, I was touched that he made the effort to be there. We were part of the same community. I’m uncomfortable with how close I came to not being there for him, and for them, now.
Technology has made cancelling plans a cinch. We never even have to speak to the other person, never have to hear their potential disappointment; we can send a quick message, usually our friends absolve us of any guilt, and we move on.
It is frictionless, yet there is a real cost to these lost plans. Sure, we can catch up online, but these interactions rarely come close to being in the presence of another person. We miss learning their facial expressions, their subtle tone shifts, registering what is beautiful about them or what is strange. The more time we spend alone and online, the greater the loss of meaningful connection with our friends and wider communities.
As the mental health researcher and author Brad Stulberg argues in his 2021 book The Practice of Groundedness, cancelling plans to give ourselves more “free time” or to binge-watch a series, or get more sleep, might feel great in the moment, but ultimately, it is communities and a deep sense of belonging that give our lives joy and meaning.
The key, Stulberg writes, is feeling an obligation to one another, a mutual contract of responsibility to show up again and again for each other, even when it’s not easy, especially when it’s hard; that is what builds real relationships. The ones you can rely on. These are the antidote to what Stulberg calls “shallow networks”, the ones we cultivate online that can give the pretence of intimacy.
It’s nice to think that even if I had the option of watching a screen rather than driving to Wicklow to honour David, I would still have summoned the resolve to go. But I can’t be sure.
Having a few minutes of methodical vegetable chopping gave my brain a chance to see the bigger picture. Not just about how I would spend that evening, but more in the future. We are what we repeatedly do, and to belong we have to show up.
