Short read: Why Can’t You Sit Still?

How many times have you sat down to get some work done, but within minutes found yourself reaching for your phone? Or your mind just started wandering to things that didn’t need your attention right then? In his weekly column for The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman explores this all-too-common problem.

He begins with a word an editor once taught him – “Sitzfleisch,” German for the ability to sit still for a long time. “If you want to be a professional writer, you need Sitzfleisch,” the editor said; many talented writers, he warned, “had failed to progress because they wrote beautifully but not for long enough.” The puzzle, Rothman notes, is a strange one: Newton’s first law says bodies at rest stay at rest, yet it plainly does not hold for human ones. “Why are we so antsy?” he asks. “Why can’t the body content itself with stillness, leavened, perhaps, by the fluttering of fingers over a keyboard or the occasional arcing turn of a page?” Having broken his ankle in June and spent much of the summer in bed, he felt the urge to move become overwhelming, and yet the same nervous energy could vanish for hours inside a fast-paced book or an absorbing show. “Just sitting there,” he writes, “it turned out, was complicated.”

Why are we built this way? Rothman reaches for the neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert, who insists that “we have a brain for one reason and one reason only, and that’s to produce adaptable and complex movements.” Creatures that stop moving stop needing one; the sea squirt uses its brain to “find a good rock on which to make its home – but then it immediately digests most of its brain, because it never needs to move again.” Nor is the brain a tidy choreographer; it is a crowd of competing subsystems, refereed by the basal ganglia, which suppress every plan but one. Beneath the surface of stillness, in other words, sits “an ambitious cacophony that must be controlled. Our brains are wild, and yet rein themselves in.”

The reframe arrives when he stops treating motion and stillness as opposites. His eight-year-old looks still at Minecraft, yet is “immersed in a flow of typing and mousing, imagining and deciding, venturing and inspecting.” If that is Sitzfleisch, then “Sitzfleisch is really about maintaining momentum. You don’t lean back in your chair when you’re making progress on the problems you’re facing; you do it when you’re stuck.” He finds the same shape in a 1944 Isaac Asimov story, in which a mining robot, stumped by a crisis, sends its subsidiary robots into pointless “callisthenic exercises” – it has entered, the engineers decide, a “moronic maze.” The lesson inverts his editor’s: “it might be because your mind is working that you can sit in place.”

His oldest witness is William James, who in 1890 likened thought to a river in which “easy simple flowing predominates,” until a logjam “creates an eddy.” A self-aware river, James imagined, would feel those eddies as “places of effort,” and welcome them, since “the whole feeling of reality, the whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life,” comes from the sense that we push ourselves forward. It is because stillness eludes us, Rothman concludes, that we know we are awake and alive rather than “a sea squirt, happily brainless on its rock.”

Which leaves the subversive point beneath the whole campaign against mind-drift. Sitting still at one task for hours, Rothman argues, is “at odds with the essential nature of the human mind,” and the fidget may be less a failure of discipline than a signal: “it’s when you don’t know what to think that your mind darts to something else.” You can force yourself to stay put, “banging away at the problem,” or “get up, do the dishes, and hope that the solution will come to you.” Either way, the restlessness was telling you something.

Note: Microsoft Corporation (Minecraft) is part of the holdings within the Marcellus Global Compounders Portfolio, a strategy offered by the IFSC branch of Marcellus Investment Managers Private Limited and regulated by the IFSCA. Accordingly, Marcellus, its employees, their immediate relatives, and clients may maintain interests or positions in this security. Any reference to this company is intended strictly for informational and educational purposes within the context of this discussion and should not be construed as investment advice.

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