The Sweet Escape

Why are we so desperate to escape?

Sitting with discomfort feels terrifying. Sitting with sadness feels unbearable, almost like a kind of death. Sitting with loneliness makes the walls close in. Sitting with ourselves, without distraction, just being, feels impossible.

So we run, and not in the exercise way, we know that that I support. We fill silences with small talk that doesn’t really matter, trivial conversations to avoid the discomfort of quiet. We text strangers online, people we barely know, just to have that ping of validation, that hit of dopamine, that makes us feel less alone. We scroll endlessly, giving our attention away to whatever the algorithm give us. We binge Netflix, put on background noise, jump between TikTok clips or Spotify playlists, anything that fills the gap silence leaves behind.

It makes me wonder: why are we so terrified of the stillness? What exactly do we think we are going to find if we pause? What is hiding in that void that feels scarier than endless distraction?

For me, it used to be the fear of what might surface. Memories I had buried. Feelings I didn’t want to feel. But over time, I learned that the void is not a monster. The void is just space. And space is something we actually need.

I am no longer afraid of discomfort. I can sit with myself. I can sit in silence, in meditation, even when my mind tries to wriggle away like a restless child. Of course it does. The mind will always try to busy itself. It loves to run through to-do lists, rehearse scenarios that haven’t happened, predict futures that may never come, and analyse every situation from the past. And when I catch it doing this, I remind it: there is no future or past right now. The only thing that actually exists is presence, this breath, this moment. And if this moment is ordinary or even uncomfortable, that is fine. It is still reality. It is still life.

When sadness comes, I let it come, and I feel it. It is ok to feel it. Nothing bad will happen to you, trust me, there is nothing wrong with you for feeling this way. In fact it is often necessary. Same with boredom, or loneliness. I feel them fully, even when they annoy me, because resisting them is worse. What you resist, persists. Or it comes in worse ways. When I lean in, something changes. The emotions run their course, and in their own time, they let go of me. Then I go back to a softer state of being.

Logic.

Our minds are addicted to it. They crave it. The prefrontal cortex, that little part of the brain that makes us human, is constantly trying to solve. It hates a loose thread. It wants everything explained, wrapped in a neat package, understandable. So the second we feel discomfort, loneliness, boredom, sadness, the mind jumps in with analysis. Why am I feeling this way? What does this mean? How do I fix it? What caused this? Who is to blame? Did I do something to get me here? It wants answers, formulas, structure.

Logic has its place, of course. It helps us navigate the world. Without logic we would not survive very long. But logic is also limited, because it can only process information through the filter of our own individual experience. My mind can create models of why I feel lonely, but those models are stitched together from my past relationships, my upbringing, my beliefs, my wounds. None of that is the full truth of reality. It is only my interpretation.

That is where we burn ourselves out. We treat our thoughts like they are universal law when in reality they are just guesses based on a very small sample size: our life so far. And because the mind cannot stand uncertainty, it keeps turning the wheel, trying to crack codes that cannot be cracked. Trying to solve the unsolvable puzzle. Trying to understand people who may never make sense. Trying to control situations that cannot be controlled. Trying to explain suffering that may never have a reason. Trying to find reasons that are pointless anyway.

This is why we are exhausted. Because logic, as brilliant as it is, is also relentless. It never shuts up. It wants closure where none exists. It wants clarity in a universe that thrives on mystery. It wants to make sense of the infinite with a finite tool.

But what if things did not need to make sense? What if boredom did not need to be solved? What if sadness did not need a cause? What if loneliness did not need a reason? What if discomfort could simply exist, without a storyline attached to it?

When I stopped trying to solve everything, I discovered something radical: peace. Not the fake kind of peace that comes from numbing or distracting. Real peace, the one that comes when you let life be as it is.

The truth is, the void is not dangerous. The void is just presence, stripped of distractions. It is where the noise falls away and the real stuff rises up. Sometimes that real stuff is painful. Sometimes it is beautiful. But either way, it is honest.

Sometimes the bravest thing we can do is nothing at all. Just sit. Just be. Just let the discomfort do what it does until it passes. Because it always does.