The pen is heavy in my hand, far heavier than its 7 grams of plastic and ink. It’s the weight of the empty hour ahead. An hour that accuses. An hour that could be filled with folding the laundry that has lived in the basket for three days, or answering the 47 unread emails blinking with miniature urgency, or finally learning how to properly chop an onion from a cheerful, fast-talking chef on YouTube. Productive things. Measurable things.
Instead, there is this pen. And this blank page. And the quiet, screaming shame of wanting to do nothing that matters.
This mindset is a virus.
It turns hobbies into side-hustles, play into practice, and rest into a scheduled task on a color-coded calendar. The result is a population of people who are terrified of an empty notebook. An empty page has no goal. It offers