Hi, I’m Claudia, a curator of human connections and thought-provoking ideas about hurry-culture. My message: Stop rushing through life - Get busy living.
Join the movement.

In May 2022, I read an article on Thrive Global titled “The Art of the Un-Rush.”

I didn’t name Un-Rush after that article. But I remember reading it and feeling something between recognition and dread, because someone had already found the phrase and used it for a listicle. Listicles!

The author described herself as a chronic rusher. A multitasker. She’d broken her foot while missing a step in a subway station while scrolling her phone. Then it happened again. And again. Four accidents before she started, in her words, trying to slow down.

She ended the piece with tips. The usual ones. But one stopped me cold.

She used to make calls while driving, or walking, or doing chores. After the accidents, she’d learned something new: maybe don’t. Her advice to the reader, verbatim, as best I recall it, was to sit down, do nothing else, and call a friend or family member. You’ll absorb more of the conversation, she wrote, than if you were driving, doing dishes, or shopping at Costco.

I couldn’t believe reading this.

We have arrived at a place where a grown woman has to be told, in a national publication, that maybe she shouldn’t have a meaningful conversation with her mother while scanning a shelf of paper towels. And she has to tell her readers the same thing, because apparently they need it too.

Another one, a few lines later: if you’re working on a presentation during a meeting, she advised, check your changes afterward – when you can focus on the material alone, instead of doing two things at once.

Seriously? What kind of meeting are you attending, I wanted to ask her, that you’re building slides through it? If it’s that dispensable, you don’t have a multitasking problem. You have a meeting problem. The advice treats the symptom and quietly agrees to leave the disease in place.

That’s when the feeling under my disbelief clarified itself. It wasn’t just How did we get here. It was:

I kept thinking about Jaws, the White Shark movie. Not the shark, but the mayor. The beach stays open after the first attack, and the second, because closing it feels disproportionate. Extreme. Bad for business. Everyone privately knows the danger is real. Nobody’s willing to do the one thing that actually removes it. So they post a lifeguard, tell people to swim in groups, keep the beach open, and manage the deaths as they come.

That’s the tip about calling your mother sitting down. That’s the tip about editing your slides after the meeting instead of during it. Small, sensible-sounding accommodations to a danger nobody’s willing to name directly, let alone close the beach on.

Here’s what I think is actually happening underneath it.

We are living inside an optimization era. Everything needs to get optimized: our life, our mind, our body. Everything gets faster, denser, more efficient, including, now, our attention. So when the exhaustion becomes undeniable, the culture doesn’t ask what deserves our attention in the first place. It optimizes the rationing of it. Slow down a little. Multitask a little more carefully. Check your phone with a bit more intention. Small adjustments, inside a structure that was never questioned.

I’d call this Scarcity Slow: treating slowness as a rare, tightly rationed resource you dole out to yourself in five-minute increments between the things that actually run your day. Instead of a normal condition you’re allowed to live inside.

Nobody actually believes rhythm – your own, unhurried, examined pace – could be the real, structural answer. Not just a wellness feature tacked onto an unchanged life, but the whole redesign. That disbelief is telling. We don’t close the beach. We post a lifeguard and call it responsible. Nice move. Wrong direction.

And here’s the part that annoyed me, once I thought about it long enough: I don’t think this is accidental.

An economy that runs on exhausted, distracted people who never stop long enough to ask Why they’re exhausted has no interest in you discovering your own rhythm. It has every interest in selling you relief. Recovery. A slightly more careful version of the same behavior. Something that lowers the exhaustion just enough to keep you functional. And buying.

I don’t think the slow-living industry exists to wake anyone up. I think its job is Managed Unconsciousness: keep the exhaustion at a tolerable, productive level. Never let it resolve. Sell the relief, not the redesign.

The system doesn’t need to force you to burn out. It just needs you to believe the alternative – actually closing the beach – is impossible.

I saw the alternative in person a few months ago, in a lost place, a crumbling 15th-century palazzo in northern Italy, that I scouted for one of the photography workshops I curate…

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Hi, I’m Claudia, a curator of human connections and thought-provoking ideas about hurry-culture. My message: Stop rushing through life - Get busy living.

Why Two Unscheduled Hours With Someone Now Feels Like Too Much

I read a line in a wine magazine and had to pause.

A 23-year-old writer was describing her dream date: a bottle of wine, nothing more expensive than that, shared slowly over a few hours in a restaurant. Then she caught herself. “But honestly,” she said, “that might be too intimate. It could scare a guy away.”

Too intimate. A bottle of wine. I didn’t get it. So, I kept reading.

She called her younger brother, who had been with his girlfriend for three years, and asked if they’d ever ordered a bottle for the table. He paused, genuinely confused. “What are you talking about?”

That pause is what this article is about. Not the wine. Not even the romance angle the piece was actually about. The pause is a 20-something brother searching his own memory for something that used to be the most ordinary form of company two people could keep. So I thought. But this young man had no idea. I don’t think that the uncomfortable feeling of sharing a bottle of wine is about Gen Z, and I don’t think it’s about romance. I think it’s about all of us, and I think the wine is just a very sharp image we are looking at.

In a world spinning faster, we didn’t get less romantic. But something quietly removed our tolerance for unstructured time with another person. And Gen Z is just showing us what the hell happened.

Here’s the part worth sitting with: this isn’t a story about a generation that wants less intimacy. It’s a story about a generation raised without ever needing to sit inside an empty gap with nothing to say or to do. Every pause in being with another person used to belong to nobody. You’d sit. You’d wait. Someone would speak eventually, or not, and either was fine. Then the gap got a job assigned to it. A phone’s job. And it’s had one for so long now that an entire generation has grown up never once experiencing an unfilled pause as anything other than a malfunction to correct.

So, let’s take the phone away. And take away the agenda too. No reservation to keep, no next stop, no plan with a shape. What’s left isn’t peace. It’s exposure. Not romantic exposure, something closer to structural exposure. Nobody is managing the moment. You are simply in it, for as long as it takes, with nothing external deciding when it ends.

That’s the actual thing the 23-year-old writer was naming, whether she had language for it or not. Not “vulnerability.” Unmanaged time. And this is worth being precise about, because it would be easy, and simply lazy, to blame this feeling and behavior on efficiency, on a generation optimizing every hour for output. That’s the obvious argument, and it isn’t the real one. The real one is stranger and more specific: an entire cohort of people has never practiced sitting across from another person with a gap in the conversation and nothing standing between them and it. Not a task. Not a screen. Not even a plan for what comes next. Just two people and duration.

Wine, of all things, used to be the tool for exactly this. Not because it’s romantic, but because it has no natural stopping point. You can’t drink a bottle efficiently. Nobody has ever “gotten through” a shared bottle of wine the way you get through a to-do list. It was woven into the fabric of ordinary social life for exactly that reason: shared at tables, poured at length, never rushed, because rushing it defeated the entire point of having it there. It is, arguably, one of the oldest low-stakes tools humans ever built for practicing unstructured presence and get-together. If people can no longer do this – which is, in my opinion, the most culturally normal, natural, zero-agenda, nothing-to-accomplish activity there is….? Then, what’s gone isn’t romantic confidence. It’s the underlying capacity itself. Just being present.

And the stakes here aren’t generational, and they aren’t really about dating at all. They’re universal, and they implicate everyone. Every time any of us, any age, any decade, reaches for a phone the instant a conversation goes quiet, or fills a lull with a suggestion of something to do next, or can’t sit in a room with another person without narrating what happens in it, we’re training the exact same reflex. It becomes a habit. Gen Z didn’t invent this kind of “gap reflex”. They were simply raised inside it from the beginning, with nothing before it to compare it to. The rest of us just have a memory of the alternative. That’s the only difference. And I find this a scary difference. What is going to happen more generations down the line?

What’s actually eroding is the capacity to be present with someone when nothing is being performed, produced, or filled. To let a conversation find its own shape because you’ve stopped managing the clock, to notice the small shift in someone’s face three sentences after they’ve said the thing that was actually on their mind, the kind of nuance you only catch because you let the time run long enough for it to surface. You cannot schedule your way into that moment. You can only be sitting there, unhurried, when it happens.

The bottle of wine isn’t the problem. The lack of a schedule attached to it is.

Thanks for reading,

With stillness, serenity, and a smile,

If you’re looking for genuine, face-to-face encounters (including some incredible South Tyrolean wine) where you can discuss with other un-rushing souls different ways in which we can further develop and improve the path we are already on to un-rush our way of living….. Join the Un-Rush Gathering in South Tyrol in October 2026 — Here you can find out all about it:

You got me hooked! I want to learn more!

Three days between vineyards and the Dolomites. For people who’ve already chosen a different pace in their life — and are done explaining it to others who don’t get it, and want to go deeper with like-minded souls.

October 18–21, 2026 · South Tyrol, Italy

THE PLACE

South Tyrol. Vineyards. Open spaces. A region in the far north of Italy, near the Alps, blending two cultures — German efficiency and Italian dolce vita. Tractors preventing you from speeding, the seasons acknowledged and celebrated, the landscape setting the pace.

We gather on a historic farm on the South Tyrolean Wine Road, surrounded by vineyards in harvest time, open space, a view over a lake, mountains standing behind all of it like they’re not in a hurry either. It’s harvest time in the apple orchards, and the colors in the vineyards are changing.

You don’t arrive here by accident — traveling the distance is part of the work, giving you a degree of disconnection from the everyday. And when you arrive, you will know you’ve left your rushing world behind. The energy here is calming, grounding. The journey worth the destination.

THE IDEA

We already agree WHY we need to slow down, to un-rush. That conversation is clear – you don’t need convincing that a world built for speed is a world built against being human. What’s left, and what’s actually hard, is the HOW: how you defend a slower rhythm once you’re back in a life that keeps pulling you off it.

Not through more discipline. Through more precision. We’ll look at what actually earns your attention and what doesn’t – the same instinct a photographer uses on a frame: what’s in it, what’s deliberately left out. We’ll look at the different speeds already inside you – where you move fast, and it’s genuinely you, where you move slow and forcing it never works, no matter whose deadline it is – and why judging every part of your life by the same measuring tape is where the trouble starts, not the cure.

We have un-rushed conversations, not a checklist the slow-living industry already sells you. It’s three days of figuring out, together, what actually holds – for people who are past the theory and need the practice tested against real resistance, not imagined.

WHAT MAKES THIS GATHERING DIFFERENT

It’s built in three layers, not one.

Provocation — Real arguments, not affirmations. Claudia opens briefly with the why – shared ground, not a lecture – then the room turns to the harder question: what it actually takes to hold a different pace once you’re back in a world built against it. Not a wellness session. A room built to think in, together.

Integration — Walking coaching with Markus, through vineyards and orchards. Movement, landscape, and conversation do work that sitting in a circle can’t.

Declaration — You leave with something in hand. Not our answers. Yours, surfaced across three days and put into words on the last morning, in your personalized journal.

It’s small on purpose. Eight people, maximum. Small enough that everyone actually meets. The tone is set by exchange, not volume.

Nothing is over-scheduled. We build in empty time deliberately – space to let the previous day actually land instead of racing to fill the next one. That absence isn’t a gap in the program. It’s part of it.

A place with character. A working South Tyrolean farm with mountain views. Local food, local wine, a landscape that isn’t a backdrop but does actual work on how you think, feel, and shift.

PROGRAM

Sunday — Arrival: Arrive by 16:00. Settle in. Aperitivo, first conversations, dinner. No name-tag icebreakers — our get-together will find its own rhythm.

Monday — The Argument Morning: Claudia opens briefly with the why, then the room turns to the how — what it actually takes to defend a slower rhythm once you’re back in the world that fights it. Markus adds a short word on what nature and movement do to a rushed mind. Real discussion, not a Q&A line. Afternoon: Walking coaching with Markus through the vineyards, in small clusters. Evening: Dinner. Special guest conversation with John McDermott — on attention, presence, and what it takes to really see another person.

Tuesday — Digestion Morning: A second conversation, going deeper into where your own life runs on borrowed urgency, and together coming up with new ideas on how to slow down in various areas of your life. Afternoon: Deliberately empty. Rest, walk, write, disappear for a few hours. This is not downtime between the real content — it is the content. Evening: Communal dinner, unstructured. A fire, if the weather allows it.

Wednesday — Declaration Morning: Closing session. Each participant writes their own short manifesto — a working answer to what they now know that they didn’t three days ago. Closing circle. Depart by 16:00.

WHO IS THIS FOR

You’ve already done the work of choosing differently, your own rhythm. You’ve already had the conversation where the other person nods and you realize, mid-sentence, they don’t actually get it. You’re not looking for someone to explain why slowing down matters — you already know. You’re looking for people who are living it, thinking about it, and pushing it further.

This gathering is for changemakers, entrepreneurs, artists, leaders, creators, and life-designers who want:

— Ideas sharp enough to keep them thinking — People who make their standard feel normal, not exceptional — A lived experience, not another framework to read about

Not people looking for healing. People looking for ammunition and belonging.

This is me! I want to join!

WHAT YOU TAKE AWAY

After days like these, you take away one thing above all else: greater clarity.

Clarity about

• What is really important to you

• What your own rhythm could look like

• And what small changes are possible in your everyday lives

• How to reconfigure your life around what truly matters

The retreat does not provide ready-made answers.

But it creates space for your own answers to emerge.

YOUR HOSTS

Claudia Brose is the founder of Un-Rush and the author of this publication. For ten years, she built and ran a photography academy — bringing together passionate amateurs and professional instructors at a historic winery in northern Italy, creating the conditions for creative depth to happen. What participants said about those gatherings: built with “heart, style, and structure,” with “such care for each participant” — and a rare talent for “bringing together the right people who fit together.”

Un-Rush is where that same instinct for gathering people turns toward a different question: not how to see better through a lens, but how to live at your own speed in a world that keeps trying to set it for you. Her own path — Germany, Tokyo, San Francisco, the Italian Alps — isn’t a backstory. It’s thirty years of choosing her own rhythm over the world’s expectations, and proof that what Un-Rush argues for is actually possible.

Markus Vaja is from South Tyrol, with 35 years in the industrial sector — 30 of them in management, three abroad. In recent years, he’s combined a lifelong pull toward the outdoors with a talent for helping people navigate real change. He’s a certified systemic personal and business coach and a hiking guide, and he believes that being genuinely seen and accompanied is what makes change actually stick.

“The coaching sessions in nature had a profound effect on me. It was different — honest, peaceful, and very powerful.” — Lisa, project manager

John McDermott is an internationally recognized photographer whose career spans the golden age of San Francisco’s commercial photography scene, the rise of Silicon Valley, international sports coverage, and portraiture of the well-known and the entirely unknown. His work is built on the same instincts Un-Rush argues for: observation, empathy, presence. “I’m not interested in the picture — I’m interested in the person,” he says. “With that attitude, you end up with a picture that speaks.” At the gathering, John leads a conversation at dinner on presence and attention.

“John is a brilliant teacher with a wealth of experience that’s truly remarkable. You learn an awful lot from him.” — Roland B.

THE DETAILS

How do I get there?

• Train Station Bozen/Bolzano – we pick you up.

• There is a small airport in Bolzano/Bozen, the capital of South Tyrol, a 20-minute drive from our location. If you come to this airport, we will pick you up.

• Other airports are Verona, Venice, Milan, or Munich. From those airports, you take a train to the Bozen/Bolzano train station. (Train Munich to Bozen 3 hours, train Verona to Bozen 1,5 hours, train Venice to Bozen 2 hours, train Milan to Bozen 3 hours+). We pick you up at the Bozen/Bolzano train station.

Participants

• Maximum 8 people. Kept small so the tone is set by exchange, not volume.

Price

• Euro € 895,- inkl. 19% VAT
  Includes the Aperitivo on the first night, and 1 nights’ dinner, all sessions, walking coaching with Markus, and behind-the-scenes images from John McDermott. Accommodation and travel are separate — see below.

Accommodation/Rooming configuration

• Vacation apartment, 4 single-use bedrooms sharing 1,5 baths — €90 per room/night when 4 people share / 116,- per room/night when 3 people share

• Vacation apartment, 3single-use bedrooms sharing 2 baths — €110 per room/night

• 2 vacation apartments, 1 bedroom each — €130 per apartment/person/night

• Small 3-star hotel, 4-minute walk from the farm — from €95 per room/night/incl. breakfast

Good to know

• In this area, South Tyrol, for about 70% of the population, the first language is German, then you have Italian, and in some areas, the original language is Ladin, which is over 1,000 years old.

• The capital is Bozen/Bolzano (German/Italian).

HOW CAN I JOIN?

Come with a curious mind. Leave with something in your hands, and people in your corner who already speak the language.

Hi, I’m Claudia, a curator of human connections and thought-provoking ideas about a world that’s always rushing. My mission: flipping the script on hurry-culture.

A friend and I were talking, and I said it out loud before I’d thought it through: I’m too slow. Writing articles, copy, strategy — all of it takes me longer than it should.

She agreed. “Yeah,” she said. “You are often too slow. Speed it up a bit.”

I felt it land somewhere in my chest before I felt it in my head. A blockage. A kind of misalignment, like something had been pushed slightly out of place. My first move was to defend myself — to explain, to apologize, to promise I’d get faster. Underneath that was a bigger, uglier question I didn’t say out loud: is this a flaw I need to fix, or is this just who I am?

If it’s a flaw, then fixing it means becoming someone else. A faster version. A more efficient one. Most advice about change is built on exactly that premise — become a new person, step into someone you’re not yet. But there’s another way to hear “change,” one I trust more: not becoming someone new, but excavating who you actually are underneath the belief systems that told you who to be. I am an introvert. I think before I speak. I need time alone to recharge, and I need depth before I can move. That’s not a malfunction. That’s the wiring.

So I stopped defending myself and asked a different question: what if the problem isn’t that I’m slow? What if the problem is that there’s one universal speed standard being applied to a life that was never built to move at a single pace?

The Measuring Tape Problem

I read a story once — I can’t find the source anymore, but it stuck with me the way only true things stick. A journalist and mother was rushing to get her two daughters out the door. One of them was sitting at the kitchen table, fully absorbed in her drawing, carefully sorting her coloring pens by color before she’d even consider putting them in her bag. The mother felt the familiar heat of impatience rising — we don’t have time for this, hurry up, we’re going to be late.

And then she stopped. She realized her two daughters simply moved through the world at different speeds. Not better, not worse. Different. One fast, one slow, both correct for who they were. The mother’s job wasn’t to apply one tempo to both children. It was to see each child clearly enough to meet her where she actually lived.

That’s the Measuring Tape Problem: we take a single standard for how fast a thing should happen, and we press it against every part of a life, regardless of whether that part was ever wired to move at that speed. Fast in some rooms, and it feels like flow. Slow in others, and no deadline — internal or external — will change that. The mistake was never the slowness. The mistake was the single standard.

Kimi Werner, the freediver who won the 2008 U.S. Spearfishing National Championship, discovered a version of this forty-five meters underwater, holding one breath, no tank, diving slowly in the national competition. She described diving down and seeing nothing but darkness beneath her, panicking, certain the bottom would never come, clawing back to the surface, gasping. The fix wasn’t to push harder or move faster. It was the opposite.

That’s her rule, and it’s exactly backwards from everything we’re taught about urgency. She learned to let go of needing to know where the bottom was, to trust it would arrive, and only then did she reach it. Speed, under pressure, was the thing standing between her and the bottom of the Atlantic. Not the way there.

Outsourced Urgency

Here’s the part I didn’t expect to find, once I stopped defending my own pace long enough to look at where the pressure was actually coming from.

Why does anyone tell someone else to hurry up?

Not because it’s good for the other person. Because it’s good for them. You honk at the car in front of you, not because you want that driver to reach their destination sooner, but because you need to be somewhere. If you’re on a shared project, you want your collaborators to move faster because the project’s success is now tangled up with your own outcome. A Formula One driver has never once, in the history of the sport, told a rival to speed up.

There’s a second version of this — the person who pushes you to go faster because they love you and want to see you flourish. A parent, a mentor, a friend who genuinely wants your best. That pressure is different in kind, not just in degree, because it’s actually about you.

But most of the pressure to hurry isn’t that. Most of it is the first kind: someone else’s deadline, someone else’s outcome, someone else’s discomfort with waiting — handed to you and relabeled as your personal failing. I call this Outsourced Urgency. The speed someone demands of you is very often the speed they need, dressed up as an observation about your character.

Once you see it, the pressure changes shape. It doesn’t disappear — you still feel it arrive. But you no longer receive it as a verdict. You receive it as information: this is what this person needs, in this moment, for their own reasons. That information gives you something you didn’t have when the pressure first landed — distance. And distance gives you a choice. You can ask them directly why they need it faster. You can decide whether this is a shared goal worth adjusting your pace for or someone else’s urgency you were never obligated to carry. Either way, you’re no longer just getting run over.

The unpleasant tightness in the chest — the one I felt the moment my friend said “speed it up” — still arrives. But it shortens now. It’s a signal, not a sentence. I catch it, I breathe, and I ask the question underneath it before I ask anything else: whose urgency is this, actually?

Every time someone tells you to hurry up, they’re not talking about your pace. They’re talking about theirs.

That’s the whole mechanism. It’s not a productivity hack, and it’s not permission to ignore every deadline that ever lands on your desk. It’s a way of seeing clearly enough to tell the difference between the pace that’s actually yours and the pace someone else needed you to borrow.

Thanks for reading,

With stillness, serenity, and a smile,

If you’re looking for genuine, face-to-face encounters where you can discuss with like-minded un-rushing souls ways in which you can further develop and improve the path you are already on to un-rush your way of living….. Join the Un-Rush Gathering in South Tyrol in October 2026 — Here you can find out all about it:

I like to know more....

Hi, I’m Claudia, a curator of thoughts and human connections to push together against a rushing world – to bring joy back into our lives.

A friend told me a story on a long hike a few weeks ago, somewhere in the mountains above the valley where I live and he visited me.

He’d been going to the same gym for years. In the past years, he said, something had changed – not the equipment, not the hours, not the membership. Something harder to name. He walked in one morning and looked around and realized: nobody was talking to anyone. Every person was on a machine, headphones in, eyes on a screen, moving through their workout in a sealed private bubble. No nod of recognition across the room. No exchange of tips between sets. No laughter. No small story told between a man catching his breath and a woman adjusting a cable. The gym had always been, in some unremarkable way, a social place – the kind of place where you accumulated small human moments without trying. Now it was a room full of people optimizing themselves in parallel. Together, but completely alone.

He didn’t say it as a complaint. He said it the way you say something when you’re not sure how to place it. I knew exactly what he meant. And walking through the mountains – the physical opposite of a screen, a treadmill, a sealed private bubble –one question arrived and wouldn’t leave: what can one person do against something this large? Before I could answer that, I had to understand what had actually been taken.

The obvious answer?

The obvious answer is technology. The phone. The algorithm. The always-available stimulation that makes an unoccupied moment feel like a problem to be solved. But that’s the surface. The phone is a symptom. The question is what made us reach for it, what made the gap feel so intolerable that we’d rather scroll through nothing than sit inside a moment of unstructured time.

Here is what I think actually happened. We didn’t lose time. We still have 24 hours. We lost the gaps. The unscheduled moments. The small, structureless in-betweens. The walk from one meeting to the next. The few minutes in a waiting room. The pause before the next task arrives. The idle moment at the gym when the set is done and nobody’s watching and there’s nothing required of you.

These gaps were never nothing. They were the connective tissue of a human life. They were where you noticed things. A stranger’s face, a shift in the weather, the way a colleague looked tired. Where you had the thought that became the idea. Where you recovered, without knowing you were recovering. Where empathy happened, because empathy requires a moment of unhurried attention, and unhurried attention requires a gap.

The urgency program didn’t steal your calendar. It stole the gaps and small moments in a day. And when the gaps went, the glue holding those life-moments, human-moments together, went with them.

Observation. Curiosity. Patience. The pleasure of a small exchange with someone you’ll never see again. The wisdom of an older person, offered slowly and received only if you were slow enough to receive it. The surprise encounter. The unlocked thought. The sense – quiet, easy, completely ordinary – of being alive in a specific moment that will not come again.

Gone. Not because anyone took them. Because we keep filling the small moments.

Stop filling. Not less filling. Not mindful filling

This is where most conversations about slowing down go wrong. They tell you to add something. A morning practice. A meditation app. A digital detox weekend. A breathing exercise. A journaling ritual. A walk in nature, taken deliberately, logged as wellness.

The intention is right. The diagnosis is wrong. You cannot fill the gap with a better thing to fill it with. The gap is not a container waiting for superior content. The gap is the point. The empty, unoptimized, slightly uncomfortable moment of being alive without a task. That is exactly what was taken, and you cannot restore it by scheduling it back in between other scheduled things.

The real answer is harder, less marketable, and almost nobody in the slow living space will say it directly: Stop filling. Not less filling. Not mindful filling. Not filling with intention. Stop. Sit with what’s there when nothing is there. This is where it gets genuinely uncomfortable. And genuinely interesting. Because the moment you stop filling, something arrives. Not peace, necessarily. Not insight, on demand. What arrives first, for most people, is a question they’ve been outrunning.

The gym, the phone, the seamlessly stitched-together day, they are all, in part, an answer to that question. A way of never having to find out. Filling the gap means never having to sit with whatever it contains. And what it contains, for many people, is themselves – their actual thoughts, their actual feelings, their actual life, unmediated by stimulation.

Someone once observed that it takes a person two years to learn to speak, and fifty years to learn to be silent. The attribution is disputed, but the observation is not. Silence is not the absence of noise. It is a capacity – one that has to be developed, practiced, protected. And it is the capacity we have most systematically destroyed.

Robert Waldinger, who has directed the longest-running study on human happiness ever conducted, put it plainly: sometimes the most useful thing we can do with an uncomfortable moment is, simply, nothing. The discomfort we flee doesn’t disappear. It waits. And filling every uncomfortable moment doesn’t do for us what we hope.

What it does is keep us from finding out what we actually need.

Your ordinary Tuesday when your perspective shifts

Here is what changes on an ordinary Tuesday for you when your perspective shifts.

You walk from one meeting to the next, and instead of reaching for the phone, you notice the reach. You feel the nudge – the small muscular habit of filling – and you ask a second question alongside the first. The first question is the usual one: who can I call, what can I check, what’s next? The second question is new: why do I feel the need to fill this? What am I not wanting to sit with?

You don’t always answer it. But you start asking.

And over time, something else shifts: you begin to understand what actually replenishes you. Not what the productivity framework says should replenish you. Not what the slow living aesthetic tells you to want. What actually works for YOU, specifically, given how you are wired. Some people recover in conversation. Others in silence. Some need movement. Others need stillness. The urgency program doesn’t care about any of this, it has one instruction: fill the gap, stay productive, keep moving. Your own rhythm is different. But you can only find it when you stop running the world’s program of speed and hurry long enough to hear it.

The person who does this on Tuesday – who takes the walk in silence before the negotiation, who lets the lunch break be an actual break, who resists the reflex to fill the five minutes between tasks – does something that looks small and is not small at all.

She becomes visible proof that another way exists.

What can one person do against something this large?

This is the part that most conversations about individual action get wrong.

They ask: what can one person do against something this large? And the question contains a hidden assumption. That the unit of change is policy, or movement, or scale. That nothing counts until it’s big. But urgency culture is not maintained by laws. It’s maintained by behavior: by millions of individual compliance decisions, made every day, in gyms and waiting rooms and cars and hallways, by people who reach for the phone not because they have to but because the gap felt intolerable and filling it felt normal.

Which means every single person who stops, who lets the gap be a gap, who sits with the uncomfortable moment, who walks to the next thing in silence and arrives more present than they left, is doing something the system genuinely cannot absorb.

Your awakening is the one thing it cannot account for.

Sebastião Salgado and his wife stood on a hillside in Brazil where a forest used to be. The land had been declared unrecoverable. In 2001 they began planting trees. Not thousands at once, not with a plan to change the world by next quarter. One at a time, day after day, year after year. Twenty years later, two million trees had become a living, breathing forest. Species that had vanished returned, water returned, life returned to land the world had given up on. Salgado held the image of the forest in his mind. And he planted the next tree.

The gym my friend described is a room where the forest is gone. Every person sealed inside their optimization bubble, no glue, no gaps, no connection. That is what the urgency program looks like when it has run its full impact in a single room. But someone has to be the first person to take the headphones out. To nod across the room. To let the gap be a gap. To be, for thirty seconds, a human being in the presence of other human beings rather than a unit of performance moving through a shared space.

You don’t need a movement to begin. You need a Tuesday where you begin. With awareness.

This is how humanity comes together again — not from above, but through every single encounter between us as human beings.

Thanks for reading,

With stillness, serenity, and a smile,

Claudia

If you like to dig deeper into what makes you walk as yourself again - I created something for you: A 7-Day-Challenge for People Who Know How to DO — and Have Forgotten How to BE. A 7-day PDF workbook. One chapter per day. Read slowly. Written in. Returned to. No video. No live sessions. No app. No notifications. A document you can hold.

I want to walk as myself again

Hi, I’m Claudia, helping you change the way you think about life.
One rhythm at a time. Together we flip the script on this world’s hurry culture.

You reach for your phone before you even notice it….

…a reflex because we got trained to treat an empty moment as a problem requiring an immediate solution.

I want to touch on something inside you - that was probably trained to treat an empty moment as a problem requiring an immediate solution.

There’s a particular kind of silence that’s become almost unbearable. Did you notice?

It’s not the silence of a library, or a held breath, or a moment of grief. It’s smaller than that, and stranger. It’s the two minutes between meetings. The elevator ride. The kettle boiling. The gap between getting in the car and starting the engine.

In that gap, before you’ve even registered there’s a choice to make, your hand is already moving toward your phone.

I want you to notice this feeling: Before you’ve decided to.

That’s the part that should give us pause. Not the phone itself, not the scrolling, not even the content of whatever fills the gap. The part worth sitting with is that the filling happens before the deciding. Something in you has been trained to treat an empty moment as a problem requiring an immediate solution.

We don’t talk about this enough. We talk about burnout, about boundaries, about digital wellness. All real, all worth addressing. But underneath those conversations is something quieter and, I think, more unsettling: an entire generation of capable, intelligent people who have lost the ability to simply be in a moment without immediately managing it.

You know how to do. You’ve gotten remarkably good at doing. Efficient, competent, often impressive. When you are asked you to execute a task, solve a problem, fill a calendar. Hey, you’re fluent in that language.

Asked to sit in ninety seconds of nothing, and something in you starts to panic.

This isn’t a flaw in your character. It’s not laziness, and it’s not a failure of discipline. It’s what happens when a person has spent years – maybe decades – running at a pace that was handed to them rather than chosen by them. The nervous system adapts. It learns that stillness is unsafe, or at least unproductive, and it starts treating every gap as something to close as quickly as possible.

I think about a friend who once described her relationship to those awkward, brief gap moments – the ones where we feel uncomfortable with the “nothing” – this way: “I know how to do. I have forgotten how to be.” She wasn’t being dramatic. She was being precise. Doing was the language she was fluent in. Being was a language she’d lost somewhere along the way.

I suspect she’s not alone. I suspect most of us are fluent in doing and have quietly, almost imperceptibly, lost our fluency in being.

Here’s what makes this particularly insidious: it doesn’t look like a crisis. It looks like a well-functioning life. You go to work, you raise your children, you answer your emails, you exercise, you eat reasonably well. From the outside, nothing is wrong. From the inside, something has gone quiet that used to make noise – your own sense of having a self that exists apart from its output.

Sir Richard Branson, of all people, once put it plainly: “It’s the moments that I stopped just to be, rather than do, that have given me true happiness. Why? Because allowing yourself just to be, puts things into perspective. Try it. Be still. Be present.”

Even someone who has spent a lifetime building, launching, and doing at a relentless pace landed on the same recognition. The stillness isn’t the opposite of the life you’re building. It might be the thing that lets you see it clearly.

This is not a productivity problem. It’s not solved by a better app, a stricter morning routine, or a weekend of digital detox that you’ll abandon by Tuesday. Those solutions work from the outside in. They adjust your schedule without ever asking why you needed the schedule adjusted in the first place.

The real work is from the inside out. It starts with noticing. Not judging, not fixing, just noticing. Noticing the moment your hand moves toward the phone before you’ve decided to. It starts with asking where that reflex came from, and whether it’s actually yours.

This is the work I’ve spent the last several years doing myself, and the work I built “I Walk as Myself” to help you do too.

It’s a 7-day challenge – a PDF workbook, one chapter a day, designed to be read slowly and written in rather than consumed and forgotten. No videos, no live calls, no app pinging you with reminders. Just seven days that move you from naming what’s actually happening, through excavating the values you’ve lost contact with, to writing a short personal declaration of how you actually want to move through your life. And then living one ordinary day according to it.

It won’t fix everything. It isn’t meant to. But by the end of it, you’ll likely have caught at least one moment, on an entirely ordinary day, where you think, clearly and for the first time in a while have this amazing feeling of: I am walking as myself.

Once you feel that, you don’t forget it. It becomes the standard everything else gets measured against.

If that sounds like something you need, you can find the 7-Day-Challenge here:

Yes, I want to walk as myself

And if you try it, I’d genuinely like to hear how it goes.

Thanks for reading,

With stillness, serenity, and a smile,

Claudia

Hi, I’m Claudia, speaking to those who refuse to let the world set their rhythm.
Together, we will flip the script on hurry culture.

The World Wants You To Think In Either/Or. I Want You To Embrace A Both/And Way Of Thinking.

There is a wine barrel turned table I return to in my mind when I need to remember what integration actually looks like. Integration in the sense of both/and way of thinking.

It’s an evening in South Tyrol. A wine bar with a garden, where we often go to, spontaneously. And as usual, we run into some friends there. On the wine barrel: a Bavarian beer, two glasses of Italian wine, and a Spritz. My friends talk to me in German. When they turn to my American husband, they switch to Italian, because he speaks fluent Italian and why would you do anything else? The conversation moves between both languages, even some English in between, the way it moves between topics: without announcement, without negotiation, without anyone deciding a direction.

An English friend visiting from California watched us with mild confusion. Are they German? she asked, hearing the language around her. South Tyrolean, I said. First language German, officially part of Italy. She frowned slightly, it didn’t quite compute.

I asked her a question back. If California were absorbed into Mexico tomorrow, and you were told to forget English, speak only Spanish, leave your customs at the door – would you? Of course not. So why would you expect these people to? You don’t erase what you are when the world reorganizes around you. You integrate it. Both, the old and the new. The inherited and the adopted. That’s not confusion. That’s wholeness. She understood then.

This is South Tyrol. Historically German-Austrian, geographically Italian, linguistically both. People here don’t balance German efficiency with Italian dolce vita. They don’t take turns. They don’t manage the tension. They embraced two entire cultures into a third thing that is completely itself, and so natural that nobody thinks to call it remarkable. Only travelers look puzzled. Locals don’t blink.

I have lived in Tokyo, San Francisco, the Italian Alps. I have had at a lot of different kinds of gatherings. And the thing I know now, that I didn’t have language for then, is this: that experience with friends over a glass of wine in South Tyrol is not a pleasant anomaly. It is the proof of concept.

The performance of being one thing

In San Francisco, getting together for a drink required a calendar invitation. The conversations were often professional, what you were building, what you were raising, what stage you were at. Not because the people were shallow. Because the culture ran on a single, efficient question:

What do you do?

Four words. The entire architecture of the either/or way of thinking packed into a single sentence. The question doesn’t ask who you are. It asks which lane you’re in. It asks for your category. And it expects a clean answer, because a clean answer is faster, more useful, easier to file.

The exhausting part was never answering the question. The exhausting part was the years of quietly agreeing with its premise. Of editing yourself to fit a description. Of carrying around the parts of you that didn’t belong in the answer and finding nowhere to put them.

This is the either/or way of thinking at work. Not a dramatic ultimatum, a quiet, daily pressure to be one legible thing. Fast or slow. Hard or soft. Ambitious or centered. The world doesn’t ask you to choose once. It asks you to choose constantly, in small ways, until choosing becomes automatic and you stop noticing what you left on the table.

You are giving up parts of yourself when you say I am this, because this is my profession, and I am not that, because that is just the secret artist inside of me. You kept agreeing to be simpler than you are because the world moves faster when you do.

You can slow down and let both the professional and the artist be alive.

The mechanism nobody names

Here is what the either/or way of thinking actually is, underneath its reasonable surface: It is a social control mechanism. Not a conspiracy, but a convenience. The world functions more efficiently when its parts are predictable. Simple people are easier to manage, deploy, and categorize. Complex people introduce friction. They see more options. They question the framing. They take longer to answer because they’re actually thinking.

The pressure to choose isn’t coming from logic. It’s coming from a system that profits from your simplicity.

What speed does to this problem is make it worse. The rushed mind cannot hold complexity. It collapses everything into binary because that is the only cognitive operation available at pace. Either/or isn’t just socially convenient. It is what hurry produces. Slow the mind down, and nuance returns. The grey space between black and white becomes visible again. The both/and option, which was always there, comes back into focus.

The rushed mind doesn’t choose either/or because it’s logical. It chooses it because it’s the only thing fast enough.

What range actually looks like

A friend once asked how I keep generating ideas. She was stuck – a business consultant who had stopped loving her work but couldn’t see her way out. She didn’t know what else she could do, what other field she could build something in.

I asked about her other interests. Horses, she said. She’d ridden since childhood. I mentioned horse-assisted therapy for corporate stress management, a field that uses consulting and leadership knowledge, in nature, with animals, for exactly the kind of burned-out professionals she’d spent years watching from across the boardroom table. She hadn’t seen the bridge. I saw it, because I love looking across multiple domains at once, not down a single lane.

Sebastião Salgado was once asked what young photographers should study. His answer: not photography. Study economics. Geography. Politics. Anything that teaches you to understand what you’re looking at when you pick up a camera. The image is only as deep as the person behind it. Range is not distraction. Range is depth, arriving from an unexpected direction.

What the both/and concept actually requires

Here is where I want to be honest with you, because this is the part that gets left out.

Both/and is not a cure for the overwhelm of too many choices. We live in a world of infinite options, and studies consistently show that more choice doesn’t make people freer, it makes them more anxious, more dissatisfied, more likely to make no decision at all or the wrong one. The abundance of both/and, without an inner compass to navigate it, is its own kind of paralysis.

The both/and life is not “have everything.” It is “integrate what is genuinely yours.”

That requires knowing what is genuinely yours. Which requires the one thing the urgency culture is designed to prevent: time to be still, to slow down, to understand yourself. Without an inner code – real values, not inherited ones – both/and becomes noise. With it, both/and becomes precision. You are not trying to hold everything. You are refusing to cut off the parts of yourself that are real.

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said it plainly: “I totally rebel against that. I refuse to believe that you cannot be both compassionate and strong.” She was describing a specific accusation – that empathy is weakness, that softness disqualifies strength. The world read her as a contradiction. She knew she was complete. The difference between those two readings is not a philosophical question. It is a question of who gets to define what power looks like.

The Samurai understood this before any of us had language for it. The warrior-poet was not a compromise between fighting and culture. The integration of fierce and refined, precise and philosophical, lethal and literate – that was the whole point. The samurai’s effectiveness came from their completeness. Not from having chosen one thing.

What I kept, across every border

I have lived in several countries on different continents. People sometimes said, with the best intentions: you can’t keep up close friendships from home when you live that far away. It’s just how it goes. You move, you shed, that’s life.

I have friends I have known since the sandbox. Two best friends from elementary school. People I have known for thirty years, across every move, every time zone, every reinvention of my life. Not because I am unusually disciplined about staying in touch. Because friendship is a genuine, important value for me. And you tend to what you actually value regardless of the friction.

The people who lost their friendships abroad didn’t lose them because of distance. They lost them because they accepted the premise that distance meant choosing. They took the either/or at face value. Here or there. Then or now. Old life or new one.

I thought they were strange. They thought I was strange. We were both right. We were operating on entirely different assumptions about what was possible.

Tuesday in the meeting

She is sitting in a meeting. Two colleagues are arguing. One wants this. One wants that. The room is waiting for people to pick sides because that is how the conversation has been framed, and everyone is moving fast enough that nobody has stopped to question the frame.

She notices something. She is not on his side or her side. She can see the argument in both directions. Not because she is conflict-avoidant or uncommitted. Because she slowed down long enough to look at the whole problem instead of one half of it. I can see his perspective and I understand your point of view, she says. I can see different perspectives on this matter – which gives me new ideas for a possible solution.

What looks like indecision is actually the highest level of clarity available in the room. Everyone who picked a side narrowed their vision. She expanded hers. She is not the one who couldn’t decide. She is the only one who could see the whole thing.

She stopped pressuring herself to like this or that, when she actually likes both. To be this or that, when she is actually both. Not as a compromise. Not as an inability to commit. As an accurate description of what she is. That’s why she felt different, this time at the Tuesday meeting.

It is not a dramatic moment. She had shifted. She could feel it in the meeting. And mostly, it felt like relief.

The wine bar, again

The puzzled traveler who hears two people speaking different languages to each other and wonders what is happening – they are not stupid. They are simply running the either/or program. Language A or Language B. German or Italian. Choose.

The local who doesn’t blink has blended something the traveler hasn’t. Not a philosophy they read. A way of being they practiced until it became natural. Your reader is, right now, the puzzled traveler. Trained to flatten complexity. Trained to pick lanes. Trained to agree to be simpler than they are because the world moves faster when they do.

The both/and life is not a personality type you either have or don’t. It is a capacity that can be built, by anyone willing to slow down long enough to stop agreeing with a premise that was never theirs. The world wants you to choose. And they don’t put it out as a requirement, but as a request, made by people who find you easier to manage when you do.

You are not a contradiction. You are more complete when you open yourself up for a both/and way of thinking.

You can refuse the either/or. Not loudly, not as performance. Just quietly, precisely, on an ordinary Tuesday – as the most natural thing in the world.

The Samurai didn’t choose between the warrior and the poet. Neither should you.

Hi, I’m Claudia, speaking to those who refuse to let the world set their rhythm and help them reclaim what they’ve been too busy to notice they’ve lost.
Together, we will flip the script on hurry culture.

You were taught that strength means pushing harder. You were taught wrong.

There was a copy machine on the floor above my office at the ad agency I worked. Whenever a presentation needed copying, someone had to walk up there, feed the pages in, and stand while the machine did its slow, methodical work. Most people dreaded it. The interruption. The wasted minutes. The impatience of watching paper move at its own pace while the agency buzzed below.

I loved it.

I had a few minutes alone. My body moving after hours at a desk. The quiet of that corridor while noise hummed everywhere else. I would stand there, calm, and return to my desk more present than I’d left it.

One day, a colleague stopped me. “You always stand there with such stillness. Such inner balance. How do you do that?” I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t been doing anything. I was just... there. But then I thought: I find it more unusual that you wouldn’t want this.

Somehow, that moment has stayed with me. Not because it was profound. It wasn’t. Because it revealed something I’ve been turning over ever since: most people experience stillness as a problem to escape. I experience it as a resource to enter.

And somewhere between those two responses lies the thought process and argument of what you are going to read now.

The Arrow

When I lived in Japan, I practiced Kyudo. Japanese archery. I did it for many years. I love it for many reasons.

If you’ve never watched it, the first thing that strikes you is the slowness. The archer kneels. Rises. Lifts the bow in a movement so deliberate it almost stops time. Pulls the string back, holds – spine, hands, fingers, breath, eyes all in alignment, and releases. The arrow doesn’t drift. It flies.

I watched my sensei do this and felt something I can only describe as recognition. The slowness did not reduce the power of the arrow. It produced it. Every element of his body in alignment created an inner stillness from which precise, effortless action became possible. I was fascinated.

When I did my weekly practice, I could feel, with complete clarity, that the elements were not in sync. Not in flow. Off. My arrow flew, but not like his. Not with that quiet authority, as it felt to me. I also knew it takes years to master this. However, the point I want to make is this:

This is what the martial arts have always known and what the modern world has systematically forgotten: the source of power is not speed. It is stillness.

What Was Installed

Most people will read the Kyudo story and feel mild interest, followed immediately by resistance. Sure, but that’s archery. In the real world, you have to move fast. Decide fast. React fast. The slow ones get left behind.

That reaction is not a personality trait. It is a program. And I want to shift your perspective.

We were taught – systematically, repeatedly, from childhood onward – that strength means pushing harder. That force is power. That aggression wins. That the person who hesitates loses. That stillness is weakness dressed up in philosophical language.

We were also taught not to trust our intuition. There are rules. Scripts. Metrics. Procedures. Everything must be measured, validated, and backed up with data. The moment you feel something before you can explain it, you’re supposed to wait. For permission, for consensus, for proof.

So intuition gets suppressed. And with it, the access to the inner knowledge that stillness makes available.

What speed really destroys is not your time. It’s your access to yourself.

The Coconut and the Peach

I watch people who wear their urgency like a badge, busyness as identity, speed as proof of importance. And I feel something I am not entirely proud of: I feel sorry for them.

Not because they are wrong. Because they are revealing something they cannot see.

They can’t be with themselves.

Think of a coconut. Hard on the outside, loud when you knock it, impressive in its solidity. Crack it open: liquid. No center.

Now think of a peach. Or an avocado. Soft on the outside, and you might mistake it for weakness. Crack it open: there is a stone inside that nothing can crush. A strong core.

The people I actually admire, the ones I watch and think there is someone who knows who they are, are often the quiet ones, with grace, dignity, and integrity. The ones who pause before speaking. Who doesn’t need the room to agree with them. Who move at a pace that seems, to an outside observer, almost unhurried. And whose decisions, when they come, land with a weight that has nothing to do with volume.

Reinhold Messner climbed every major mountain on earth. He did not race to the summits. He moved with total deliberateness, in alignment with his body, the mountain, his inner state. And he concluded: “Happiness is not found at the summit, but within us. When we are completely ourselves.”

The man who climbed every mountain on earth found that the power was never up there.

Tuesday

So what can change for you, becoming aware of this? What can be your next steps?

Not everything will change immediately. But something can shift in the ordinary texture of a day if you take this with you.

You walk out of a meeting where someone pressured you for an immediate answer. And instead of performing certainty you don’t feel, or outsourcing the decision to whoever asked most forcefully, you pause. Pause for a moment and check in with yourself. You give yourself thirty seconds to hear what you actually think.

Not because you’re slow. Because you respect your own signal.

Start to notice how many times in a day you look for permission to back up what you already know. How many times do you override your own instinct because someone else seems more confident, louder, more urgent?

And begin to ask: from what inner place am I acting? From alignment – from that still center where you know what you know? Or from powerlessness, where speed fills the gap that self-knowledge would otherwise occupy?

Standing at the copy machine taught me this before I was aware of it and had words for it. My Kyudo practice and watching the sensei confirmed it. The stillness was not the absence of power. It was the source of it.

Slow is not the opposite of ambitious. It is where real power lives.

And the moment you feel that – really feel it, not just understand it – one thing becomes permanently unnecessary:

Asking for permission to trust yourself.

I like to walk as myself

*) Become a paid member, and you receive the 7-Day-Challenge for free.

Hi, I’m Claudia, speaking to those who refuse to let the world set their speed and who want to reclaim what they’ve been too busy to notice they’ve lost. Together, we will flip the script on hurry culture.

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!

We Built A World Incompatible With Being Human

A good friend had a car accident in the middle of a busy city. Luckily, just minor injuries – yet enough to put her on sick leave for several weeks. More importantly, she was ordered to stop. To rest. To re-examine everything. The cause of the accident was a few seconds of blackout caused by extreme stress and a body on the verge of complete collapse. Two seconds of not paying attention at an intersection. Two years of daily battles as a working single mother of two. The combination exploded in that one moment.

Everything was too much, she recalled afterward. The overload of distractions, noise, dense traffic, and the relentless pressure of doing everything alone. An angry boss. An overwhelming household. Children in kindergarten and school. Debts her ex-husband had incurred and left entirely in her hands. The body, which had been sending signals for months, finally stopped sending them and simply shut down.

The therapist she was required to see after the accident forced her to pause, rest, and change. Which meant someone had to order her to. Because she hadn’t been able to do it herself.

The Machine

Why do we keep going along with it?

I felt sorry for her. And mad at her. At the same time.

Why are you always running for everyone else and not taking care of yourself? You can’t help others when you are this depleted. You didn’t listen to your body. You ignored the signals for months.

But with some distance, the anger shifted direction. Why do we go along with it? Why do we let the constant hectic and pressure of the world around us determine how we move through the day? My friend knew something was wrong. She knew for months, probably years. But she didn’t know how to escape it. There was work. There were children. There was traffic. There were debts. Demands were arriving from every direction before she’d finished responding to the last ones.

Do we actually have any control? Or are we simply at the mercy of something larger, a rhythm we got swallowed up in so gradually that we stopped noticing it wasn’t ours? There is a helplessness in that question – a feeling of being caught inside a machine we didn’t design and cannot stop.

But helplessness is only the first feeling. Underneath it, if you sit with it long enough, is something sharper.

Something built this machine. And something keeps it running.

The Descent

The real problem is this: we built a world that is systematically incompatible with being human. And then we called it progress.

In our pursuit of improving life, health, and working conditions, we accelerated innovation by consuming natural and human resources past the point of recovery. The consequences are not abstract. They are written into the places we live, the people we are becoming, and the quality of attention we can still bring to an ordinary moment.

What speed does to place.

I lived in San Francisco for fourteen years. I watched neighborhoods change – not slowly, not naturally, but with the force of greed and money that likes to move fast. Landlords evicted long-term renters to sell or re-let at four or five times the price. Technology companies, incentivized by the city itself, opened offices downtown and brought an influx of highly paid workers who needed somewhere to live. Apartments that had housed families for decades were converted to vacation rentals, cycling through a parade of short-term visitors who had no investment in the place and no reason to behave as though they did.

What disappeared was not just affordable housing. What disappeared was the neighborhood itself. The fabric of different generations living alongside each other, knowing each other, occasionally helping each other. The elderly woman who knew everyone’s name. The children who played in the street. The family who had been there for thirty years and remembered what the block used to be.

I observe something similar in the Italian Alpine region where I live now, that draws visitors for precisely what makes it extraordinary: the authentic, calm, green Alpine lifestyle. The local farms and traditions. The landscape that moves at a different pace. And yet hotels expand each season, infrastructure improves past the point of necessity, and the very qualities that attract people are being quietly consumed by the tourism economy built to serve them. The thing people come for is being destroyed by their coming.

Speed does this to places. It extracts value faster than it can be replenished. It optimizes the present at the cost of the future.

What speed does to presence.

I was sitting in a restaurant in Bologna when I noticed a group of young men at the table next to us. They were together, at least physically, at the same table. But each of them had a phone in one hand, thumb scrolling continuously, while the other hand moved the fork mechanically toward the mouth. They were not eating. They were refueling. They were not together. They were parallel. Just bodies occupying the same space while their attention was distributed across a thousand other places, none of them the room they were actually in.

I was speechless. Not because it was unusual. Because it wasn’t.

This is what speed does to presence. It makes the moment in front of you feel insufficient. There is always another stimulus available, one that is faster, more novel, more optimized for your dopamine response than the actual joy of a meal shared with friends.

What we are missing out on is not productivity, but contact. With the food, with the people, with togetherness, with the fact of being alive in a specific place at a specific moment that will not come again.

We stopped inhabiting our moments and started managing them. And we called that efficiency.

What speed does to thought.

There is a more subtle erosion that I watch happen in ordinary interactions, so common now that most people no longer notice it. I sent out a detailed communication for my project partners with dates, procedures, and information carefully organized. The questions arrive within hours. Questions whose answers are stated clearly in what I sent. Not because the people asking are careless. Because they didn’t read it. Not fully. Perhaps not at all.

This is not laziness in the traditional sense. It is the adaptation of a mind that has been trained to skim at speed. to extract the immediately useful and discard the rest, because there is always more arriving, and attending fully to any single thing feels like a luxury that cannot be afforded.

We are drowning in information and starving for understanding. Fed too much, too fast, across too many channels, by too many contributors – none of it requiring us to sit with it, question it, or allow it to change us. The result is a population that is simultaneously more informed and less capable of genuine critical thought than at any previous point in modern history.

Not dumber. Differently damaged. Trained away from depth. Rewarded for reaction. Punished by the attention economy for the slow approach of actually thinking something through.

Under this constant pressure, humans are becoming less human. More aggressive in traffic, in comment sections, in offices where the pressure has nowhere to go but sideways. More indifferent to the people around them, because indifference is an emotional response to chronic overload. Leaders have no time to listen. Workplaces where creativity is buried under deadlines. And underneath all of it, quietly, persistently: I see people who no longer know how to enjoy life. Those who have lost connection to themselves. Those who have no self-love left, not because they are broken, but because self-love requires the one resource the system is designed to extract completely: time to be still, to slow down, and to understand yourself.

We are human doings. We have forgotten how to be human beings.

And we are driving toward a cliff. But before we look over the edge, we need to ask who built the road.

Read more

Hi, I’m Claudia, speaking to those who refuse to let the world set their speed and who want to reclaim what they’ve been too busy to notice they’ve lost. Together we will flip the script on hurry culture.

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!

We Turned Being Human Into A Trend

I was being interviewed for a podcast about paying attention.

At some point, the conversation turned to walks. I mentioned, casually, that it wouldn’t occur to me to listen to music or a podcast on my daily walk in nature. I want to hear the birds. My own thoughts. The stillness. This is something I’ve loved to do for a long time - not as a practice or some deliberate act of mindfulness. Just as a natural thing to do when I step outside for my walk in nature.

The interviewer paused and said she always uses her walks to catch up on podcasts. Two things done at once. Efficient. Sensible. A small victory over a day that never has enough hours.

Thus, she found my silence interesting. Not strange or wrong. Just genuinely, mildly remarkable. Worth noting. Worth writing about in her episode description afterward, where she called it “a powerful reminder of how getting back into nature can help us reconnect with ourselves.”

I read that and sat with a feeling I couldn’t quite name at first. Powerful? I was walking. In silence. It didn’t feel anything special or different. Yet, apparently, it was.

I thought, I guess I am different, and I like it. But, THIS should be normal, not different.

What happened to us that enjoying stillness is something worth mentioning?

We drifted away from our own nature

Somewhere along the way – without a single moment anyone asked for it – we drifted so far from our own nature that we can no longer recognize it when we see it.

Did you realize? The ordinary became exotic. The natural became noteworthy. The things a human body and mind have always needed, such as silence, movement, sleep, fresh air, and time in nature, became discoveries. Research topics. Trends. Products you can buy.

However, we didn’t realize. Because the drift was so gradual, and the alternatives were so loud, and eventually the abnormal became normal enough that nobody questioned it anymore.

Consider what serious, credible institutions are now solemnly announcing. Some examples of what I found:

“Our first finding was that nature has a very powerful effect.”. Or: “A new study has surprising insights into how spending time outside affects our wellbeing.” Or, check out this one: “A 2019 study concluded that those who spent 120 minutes or more outside per week reported positive effects on their general health.”

In Canada, doctors can now prescribe national park passes to patients as part of an effort to increase access to nature and its health benefits. This is great. Love it. But, hey, we need a prescription and can’t figure this out by ourselves anymore?

In other words, we have reached the point where a physician, a person who spent a decade training to keep human beings alive, can prescribe going outside as a medical intervention.

Not as a metaphor. Not as a joke. As an actual, documented, publicly funded health program.

And somewhere, in a research lab, a scientist published a paper whose findings can be summarized as follows: “Research has shown that if we sit less and move more, we live longer.”

Wow. Who knew. I’m glad somebody told me.

Symptom versus losing trust

Here’s what I want to be precise about – because this is not a complaint about science, or researchers, or Canadian doctors, or podcast hosts who use their walks efficiently.

The research isn’t the problem. The prescriptions aren’t the problem. The two-things-at-once walk isn’t the problem.

They are the symptom. The problem is what had to happen first to an entire civilization before any of this became necessary.

We didn’t forget that nature was good for us because life got complicated. We didn’t stop sleeping because the nights got shorter. We didn’t lose the ability to sit in silence because silence became scarce.

We lost these things because we were taught – slowly, persistently, across generations – to distrust our own nature. To treat the body’s signals as inconveniences to be optimized around. To treat rest as laziness, stillness as unproductivity, time in nature as a luxury rather than a need. That’s what makes me speechless and leaves me puzzled.

You outsource your movement to a gym membership and a treadmill. You outsource your rest to a sleep protocol. You outsource your relationship with nature to a study that tells you how many minutes of outside time constitutes a therapeutic dose.

And then – this is the part that should stop us cold - you buy back a degraded version of what you already had. It’s degraded because it’s a repackage of something that existed before and it’s not authentic anymore.

The breathing book. The mindfulness app. The nature prescription. The new hot thing called NEAT movement, which means Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis, and basically stands for moving around like a normal human being.

We gave away the original. And we paid for the copy.

The fast world disconnected us from ourselves

I don’t say this from a place of having figured it out. I say it from the place of someone who walked in silence and was told one day it was powerful.

And who understood, in that moment, that the gap between what felt ordinary to me and what felt remarkable to others was not a gap in personality or preference.

It was a gap in trust.

Trust in your own body. Your own instincts. Your own nature as a human being who needs silence and movement and trees and rest. Not as a wellness strategy, but as the basic operating conditions of being alive.

That trust didn’t disappear on its own.

It was taken, gradually, efficiently, profitably, by a world that discovered it could sell you back what you’d been convinced you no longer had.

The question isn’t whether you need a nature prescription or a breathing book or a sleep protocol.

If this landed… I built something for you.
A 7-Day-Challenge “I Walk as Myself”

If you are ready to stop sleepwalking and reconnect with the person you’ve been too busy to be….. you might want to look into this:

I want to walk as myself again

Hi, I’m Claudia, speaking to those who refuse to let the world set their speed and who want to reclaim what they’ve been too busy to notice they’ve lost. Together we will flip the script on hurry culture.

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!

The Speed You’re Running At Was Never Yours

“All that fuss about ‘it has to be done quickly’ is total nonsense.”

I remember the exact moment I thought that.

It was late. Again. The third consecutive evening our team had stayed past midnight to finish a marketing campaign – urgently, the client had said. It had to be ready before the board meeting. No flexibility. No discussion. We pushed everything else aside, canceled personal plans, and ran on the particular adrenaline of manufactured crisis. Not that this would be too unusual for the advertising industry.

We delivered. On time. As requested.

Then the phone rang. The board meeting had been postponed. A few days. No big deal, apparently, on their end. Just a scheduling adjustment. The kind of thing that happens.

I sat with it for a moment. All that urgency. All those nights. All that ‘it has to be done now or the client is in trouble’, and it turned out the deadline wasn’t that important, after all. The crisis felt like a theater to me. The people who had created the emergency felt no particular obligation to acknowledge that it disturbed the work and private lives of an entire team.

We went out of our way to meet their demands. And for what? To be pushed aside like it never happened. I filed that lesson carefully. Not with bitterness. Eventually with something more useful: clarity.

That was the loud version of the urgency program. Hard to miss. Institutional absurdity at full volume.

But the urgency program has a quieter version too. More personal. More on a subconscious level. I was leaving the office one evening at 5:30pm, when a colleague looked up from their desk and said, with an ironic yet condescending smile:

“Oh, taking a half day off?”

I often worked long hours. I took the freedom to leave at a “normal” hour as I had things to do. And yet in one offhand comment, they had positioned leaving at a normal hour as an act requiring explanation. As if staying late wasn’t a choice, it was the baseline. The minimum acceptable signal that you were serious enough, committed enough, sufficiently enrolled in the program.

I was amused. But I noticed it.

Because that’s how the urgency program gets installed in us. Not through policy or mandate, but through the slow accumulation of moments like that one. Colleagues who have internalized the pace so completely that they spread it around on others without knowing they’re doing it. Without anyone asking them to.

I wasn’t questioning my work ethics. But I was wondering why they weren’t questioning their own behavior.

During my studies, I went to a university in Tokyo.

I was 24 – already, apparently, behind schedule. My Japanese host family couldn’t quite understand what had taken me so long with my studies. Fellow students from other countries were younger. In Japan, the educational pathway moved with a particular precision: school, university, work, in sequence, on time, as expected. My timeline, shaped by thirteen years of German schooling, a gap year, a master’s degree structure that took six years by design (no shorter bachelor's degree structures were possible back then), made no sense inside their framework.

I wasn’t slow. I was operating on completely different math. A math that was logic where I came from.

And standing outside my own timeline for the first time, looking at it from the outside, I saw something I couldn’t have seen from inside it:

The schedule wasn’t reality. It was a construction. Built on specific cultural assumptions, specific institutional logic, national educational structures, and specific beliefs about what a life should look like and how fast it should move.

My schedule made sense by one set of assumptions, based on my culture and upbringing. Theirs made sense by another. Neither was the truth.

Which meant the urgency I’d been absorbing since my early twenties – you’re behind, you need to hurry, the others are moving faster – wasn’t a law of nature.

It was a program.

And programs, once you can see them, can be questioned.

Here’s what the urgency program actually does. And why it’s so effective:

It disguises itself as reality.

It doesn’t announce itself as a set of cultural assumptions you’re free to examine and reject. It presents itself as just the way things are. As common sense. As the obvious, necessary pace of a functioning adult life.

The colleague who comments on your 5:30 pm departure isn’t consciously enforcing a system. They’ve internalized it so completely that deviation looks, to them, genuinely strange. The client who sets a deadline isn’t calculating how to extract your labor. They’ve simply never examined the assumption that urgency produces better work, or that their timeline matters more than yours.

The program runs without anyone operating it.

Which is exactly what makes it so hard to see. And so easy to mistake for your own choices.

You didn’t choose the speed you’re running at.

You absorbed it. From an industry that confused activity with output. From a culture that measured your worth by your pace. From a thousand small moments, a phone call about a postponed meeting, a comment about leaving at 5:30, people who couldn’t understand your timeline, that collectively installed a belief you never consciously agreed to:

Faster is better. Busier means important. Your rhythm, if it differs from the expected one, requires justification.

That belief is not the truth. It is a program.

The speed the world gave you was never yours.

The only question worth asking now is: what happens when you stop running it?

The 7-Day Challenge to Walk as Yourself

Hi, I’m Claudia, speaking to those who refuse to let the world set their speed and who want to reclaim what they’ve been too busy to notice they’ve lost. Together we will flip the script on hurry culture.

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!

I move you from living on autopilot to reconnect with the person you’ve been too busy to be

“Don’t you see that your deep-seated sense of security and inner balance is something that I and many others I know are longing for?!”

My friend and I were hiking in the Mount Tamalpais area in Marin County, California, and we ended up talking about how we move through life. I expressed my admiration for her being so tough in her career and such a fighter. That was rooted in her upbringing in modest financial circumstances and the fear of ending up there again. Rather than being in fight mode all the time, she wished to have my strong inner sense of trusting myself that things work out. I was stunned. I hadn’t seen anything special.

I always knew what I liked, appreciated, and enjoyed. But I started questioning and doubting my way until I noticed that “my” way was not wrong, but valid. Speed, pressure, and the normalization of hurry culture had tried to disconnect me from myself.

I started not defending my position anymore, but happily declaring it as a different and valid perspective.

I often get asked ‘Where does your sense of groundedness, inner strength come from’? ‘Why have you managed to show up differently to life?’ ‘How do people react when you tell them ‘I just walked’, or ‘I listened to myself’? ‘Can you tell me how to get back to living a life that feels like mine?’

You’ve Been Running At A Speed You Never Chose.

Time issues are what make you feel burned out or broken. You are not. Your nervous system has trained you to react to expectations, to urgency, and to a system that profits from your restlessness. And somewhere along the way you lost contact with what actually matters to you.

You’re someone who wants to find out why the life you’re living doesn’t quite feel like yours. You know how to DO things but have forgotten how to BE.

You’ve tried the obvious things. The meditation app. The wellness weekend. The new morning routine. They helped briefly, but then the noise returned and you were back where you started – wondering why nothing sticks. Because none of those things addressed the real problem. You don’t need another productivity system.

You need a reminder that your life is truly your own. You want to remember that you’re a person before you’re an output.

You Don’t Have A Time Problem. You Have A Values Problem.

Most approaches to slowing down work from the outside in. They give you techniques, rituals, and routines.

“I Walk as Myself” works from the inside out.

It’s built on the insights: You need to feel your natural way of being. But you cannot find your own rhythm until you know who you are underneath the speed. And most people have never paused long enough to find out.

This is not a course about slowing down. It’s a 7-day excavation of the self you’ve been too busy to be. An invitation to return to what never actually left.

What The 7 Days Actually Do:

Each day is its own complete experience – one sharp, honest essay written for that day’s work alone. Designed to be read slowly, one day at a time – no video, no live sessions, no app to download. Just precise, unhurried writing that takes you somewhere most content never goes.

One excavation question to carry through your day. One concrete action to anchor the insight. One proof of concept – a person who lived this way at full power, without ever calling it slow living.

The seven days move through five layers:

Days 1-2 — Name the Sleepwalk: See clearly what’s actually happening, and count what it has cost you.

Days 3-4 — Excavate Your Inner Code: Surface the values that were always there, waiting. Through a set of questions that I developed over many years for myself and will share now with you.

Day 5 — Dismantle the Urgency Program: Understand, intellectually and personally, that the speed you’re running at was installed. And that what was installed can be uninstalled.

Day 6 — Write Your Un-Rush Manifesto: Take everything from the first five days and crystallize it into a personal declaration. Your values. Your non-negotiables. Your chosen rhythm.

Day 7 — Walk as Yourself: One deliberate day lived according to your inner code. Three anchor moments.

By The End Of Day 7, You Will Have:

• A written list of what you will no longer tolerate—in your work, your relationships, your daily life.

• A first draft Inner Code: 3-5 values in your own words, excavated from who you actually are rather than who you think you should be.

• A personal Un-Rush Manifesto: your declaration of what you stand for, what you refuse, and how you choose to move through the world.

• And at least one moment—on an ordinary day—where you catch yourself thinking: I am walking as myself.

That moment is not a small thing. Once you feel it, you can’t unfeel it. And it becomes the standard against which everything else is measured.

Who This Is For:

The unconventional thinker who suspects the speed they’re running at is making them less, not more. They tried the band-aids and know something deeper is needed.

Who This Is Not For:

People looking for a quick fix, a motivational boost, or a productivity system.

The Format:

A 7-day PDF workbook. One chapter per day. Designed to be read slowly, written in, and returned to.

No video. No live sessions. No notifications demanding your attention.

A document you can hold onto and carry with you.

Price: €47

Change feels harder than continuing the old path. But slowing down enough to hear yourself, you realize how much of life was never meant to be rushed through in the first place.

Yes, I want to walk as myself again

Hi, I’m Claudia, speaking to those who refuse to let the world set their speed and who want to reclaim what they’ve been too busy to notice they’ve lost. Together we will flip the script on hurry culture.

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!

I am here to flip the script on hurry culture.

This is not simply about “slowing down.” It’s about becoming aware that we have become so detached from our own nature that we don’t feel and behave as ourselves anymore.

There is a different way. Because speed has changed how we treat ourselves and the world around us. Speed has robbed us of our time and of our basic human elements, such as respect, humanity, human interaction, humility, life-wisdom, caring.

Out of the desire to see people live a life that is true to oneself and not so disconnected from self, others and the world, the following 10 theses on Un-Rushing have emerged. They could be a starting point of a counter movement.

A manifesto for those who refuse to let the world set their speed.

The Un-Rush Manifesto

People aren’t just busy. They’ve disappeared.

They’ve handed themselves over to a system that profits from their urgency—outsourcing their thinking, their rhythm, their sense of what matters—until one day they look up and realize they’ve become strangers to themselves. Not burned out. Disappeared. And most are too busy to notice it’s happening.

The cost isn’t just personal. Speed has created a disconnection epidemic – from self, from others, from the world’s beauty. People treat their bodies and minds like trash cans. They walk beside themselves like numb sleepwalkers. They dream about walks they never take.

Out of the refusal to accept this as inevitable, the following ten theses on Un-Rushing have emerged. They are not a lifestyle prescription. They are a rebellion.

#1 — We Are Not Against Speed. We Are Against Disappearing.

Un-Rush does not reject technology, ambition, or forward motion. We are not romanticizing the past or prescribing a slower calendar. We are saying something more uncomfortable: that the pace most people are running at is making them strangers to themselves. That the cost of constant urgency is not just exhaustion – it is the slow erosion of everything that makes a life feel like yours. Un-Rush stands against that erosion. Not against speed itself, but against the version of yourself you lose to it.

#2 — The Glorification of Speed Is the Problem, Not the Solution.

We live in a world that has turned “busy” into a status symbol and urgency into a virtue. Hustle is worshipped. Rest is monetized. Slowing down is treated as a luxury for those who can afford it. Un-Rush names this for what it is: a cultural program installed to serve a system, not a human being. The question is not how to go faster. The question is whether the speed you’re running at was ever yours to begin with. Most people have never paused long enough to ask.

#3 — Know Your Code. Or Someone Else Will Write It For You.

You cannot find your own rhythm until you know what you stand for. And most people don’t take their time to find out. Not because they’re incurious – but because they don’t dare to follow their curiosity. The world asks them to perform, to deliver, to optimize. It does not ask them what they value, what they refuse to compromise, what they would protect even under pressure. Without that inner code, every decision is made by default – by urgency, by expectation, by whoever is loudest in the room. Un-Rush believes that excavating your values is not a luxury. It is the foundation of everything. When you know your code, the noise stops being overwhelming. It becomes irrelevant.

#4 — Stillness Is Not the Opposite of Power. It Is the Source of It.

The world has sold us a lie: that speed equals strength, that urgency signals importance, that the person who moves fastest wins. History disagrees. The Samurai’s precision came from inner quiet, not frenetic action. Marcus Aurelius ran an empire from a place of daily stillness. The most powerful people in every field move with a deliberateness that looks, from the outside, almost unhurried. Un-Rush reclaims this truth: calm is not passivity. It is the most radical competitive advantage available in a world addicted to urgency. Slow is not the opposite of ambitious. It is where real power lives.

#5 — The Speed You’re Running At Was Never Yours.

Urgency is not a personality trait. It was installed—by culture, by comparison, by a system that profits from your restlessness. Most people mistake their programming for their nature. They believe the relentless pace is simply who they are, how things are, how they must be to survive. Un-Rush challenges that belief directly. The speed you’re running at was handed to you. You inherited it, absorbed it, and eventually stopped questioning it. But inherited is not chosen. And what was installed can be uninstalled. The first act of rebellion is recognizing the difference between the rhythm the world gave you and the one that is actually yours.

#6 — We Turned Being Human Into a Trend.

We are the only species that needs a reminder to breathe. Sleep is now a biohacking protocol. Walking in nature is a wellness industry. Breathing is a course you can buy. Taking a break requires an app. Un-Rush names this absurdity clearly: we did not lose these things because life became too complex. We lost them because we became so estranged from ourselves that we needed experts to sell us back what we already had. The solution is not another program, another retreat, another optimized morning routine. The solution is to stop treating your humanity as a problem to be solved—and start trusting it as the intelligence you’ve been ignoring.

#7 — Refuse the Either/Or. Embrace the Both/And.

The world demands that you choose: fast or slow, ambitious or centered, strong or sensitive, successful or at peace. This is a false choice – and accepting it is where most people lose themselves. The most complete human beings in history were never one thing. The Samurai was a warrior and a poet. Reinhold Messner climbed every mountain on earth and built six museums. Un-Rush rejects the annoyance of either/or thinking. Integration – not balance – is the goal. You do not have to choose between being powerful and being present. Between doing remarkable work and living at a human pace. The both/and life is not a compromise. It is the fullest expression of who you actually are.

#8 — Show the Missing Human Link.

Speed has changed how we treat ourselves and the world around us. Speed has robbed us of our time and of our basic human elements – respect, humanity, human interaction, humility, life-wisdom, caring. The frantic pace of the world has turned people into disengaged, indifferent sleepwalkers who never stop racing and never stop to ask why. Un-Rush shows the missing links between speed and slow: the humanness. The moment of eye contact that actually lands. The conversation that goes somewhere real. The walk taken not for fitness but for no reason at all. These are not small things. They are the things a life is actually made of.

#9 — This Is For the Ones Who Think Differently.

Un-Rush is not for everyone. It is not for those who are comfortable sleepwalking. It is not for those who mistake busyness for meaning or speed for progress. It is for the unconventional thinkers – the ones with a gnawing sense that the life they’re living isn’t quite theirs. The ones who pause in the middle of an ordinary day and feel the question arrive: “What am I even doing here?” The ones who are done with band-aids and ready to go to the wound. Un-Rush is a manifesto for those who refuse to let the world set their speed – and who are ready to reclaim what they’ve been too busy to notice they’ve lost. If that is you, you are not alone. And you are exactly who this was built for.

#10 — The Hardest Thing Is the Most Natural Thing.

Coming back to yourself sounds simple. It is not. It requires swimming against the current of an entire culture built on your distraction. It requires tolerating the discomfort of stillness when every instinct has been trained toward motion. It requires asking questions the world never encourages you to ask—and sitting with the answers long enough for something true to emerge. But here is what Un-Rush knows: the life you are trying to reclaim is not somewhere else. It is not waiting on the other side of a transformation, a retreat, or a perfect morning routine. It is available on an ordinary Tuesday. In a deliberate walk. In a conversation where you are actually present. In the moment you catch yourself thinking: I am walking as myself. That moment is always closer than you think. The only thing standing between you and it is the speed you agreed to run at. Slow down. Not as an act of retreat. As an act of reclamation.

This is Un-Rush. If it landed, you’re in the right place.

And I built something for you:

Get the 7-Day Challenge here

Hi, I’m Claudia, speaking to those who refuse to let the world set their speed and who want to reclaim what they’ve been too busy to notice they’ve lost. Together we will flip the script on hurry culture.

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!

Keep Dreaming About Walks You Never Take

“My dream is that one day I will take a walk with you.”

A friend said this to me recently. She works as an event manager in a castle, surrounded by gardens, set in the middle of green landscape. (Yep, there are jobs like that). Nature is literally outside her door. I told her: just go. By yourself. Now. She couldn’t. Half hour break. Colleagues chatting. Lunch to make. Always something. I looked at her and said: “What the hell?”

Not unkindly. But honestly.

Because here’s what I was actually witnessing: a person who had completely lost the thread back to herself. Not because life was too hard. Not because she didn’t have time. But because somewhere along the way, she stopped asking what she wanted, and started organizing her entire existence around everything and everyone else.

The walk was never about the walk.

Here is my straight-up, honest opinion: This frantic pace of the world has turned people into disengaged, indifferent scaredy-cats who never stop racing. And never stop to ask why.

What this mean is that most people don’t have a time problem. They have a values problem.

They’ve never stopped long enough, truly stopped, to ask: What actually matters to me? What do I stand for? What would I refuse to give up, even under pressure?

Without answers to those questions, you don’t have a life. You have a schedule someone else wrote for you. (And some people like that, don’t get me wrong.)

But then you’ll keep dreaming about walks you never take.

Why this matters? Without an inner code – your north star, values, personal principles – you are permanently at the mercy of whatever the world demands next. Being aware of your values and principles is what gives you the authority to say no to urgency. It helps gives you the clarity to make decisions without anguish. And, it gives you the confidence to live on your own terms, according to your rhythm in a world that will push back hard.

I Was Told My Nature Was Wrong

Growing up, I mostly knew what I like, value, enjoy and want. But being an open and curious nature, I listened to what others had to say. I started to believe that my quiet nature, my not liking to play roles (at work), not liking to be aggressive, and needing my time, etc. are characteristics that stand in the way of moving forward in a successful career. And I had the proof. I got annoyed that people ‘spoke up’ in meetings, who had nothing to say, empty stuff which already had been said twice. But it worked. Bosses noticed them.

I was told my nature was wrong and stopping me in my life and at work. In a world rewarding noise, I felt invisible for being substantive. If you are too shy, too quiet, too kind, too serious, you ain’t go anywhere. My ‘both-and’ attitude and way of thinking doesn’t work in a world of ‘either-or’. I tried to force things. But I realized that I like my nature. When living and working in Japan I discovered that my ‘both-and’ nature wasn’t a flaw. It was a philosophy entire civilizations were built on. I was never wrong. Instead, the world was measuring me with the wrong ruler.

I took my ruler back and took a closer look at my values and principles. Checking in with my north star.

This Is How Living Without A Code Looks Like

People don’t have time anymore to sit down and think about what matters to them. They just sleepwalk through life. Slowing down to take that time might feel unproductive. Uncomfortable. Waste of time. But in the long run you waste your time working against your nature and own rhythm. You end up complaining, being a miserable soul and calling yourself a victim instead of checking in with your inner self, your north star.

We have our own clockwork and values buried inside of us but your upbringing, the pre-programmed routines and frameworks you snuggle into, distort your self-image and your belief in the rewards that the hectic world wants to sell you.

Underneath all the urgency, performance pressure, and disconnection is one missing thing: a personal code. Your values. Not rules imposed from outside, but values excavated from within.

You want to excavate your inner code.

Most people’s values are actually inherited programs. Buried in your subconscious. And finding your real code means dismantling what was installed and excavate what’s actually true for you. The Samurai’s effectiveness came from their unshakeable principles. Not rules from the outside. A code forged from within through experience and self-knowledge. And it’s practiced daily. Look at Marc Aurelius and his writings we know from a published version called Meditations. This was never meant to be a book, it was the (emperor)/philosopher’s private practice of thinking, excavating and returning to his values. Not to be found once, but to be practiced daily.

How You Can Dig Into Your Inner Code Of Values

Here are 5 excavation tools for you.

Practical and accessible questions to find your values.

1. THE NEGATIVE SPACE APPROACH

Take your note taking tool and answer the following questions:

What do you NOT like? What do you NOT tolerate? What do you refuse?

It is often much easier for us to name all the stuff we don’t want, not like, would not do or not accept than putting your finger on what you like. You will create a great list, because it gives you insights about your values and what you appreciate in life. It is like a negative space revealing the shape of what matters to you. I can get so emotional about the things I do not like and I would not want to put up with. And finally I realized that this is a positive thing because it really brought home to me what seems to be important to me.

2. THE NORTH STAR SCRIPT

Here is a list of common values to give you as a starting point. You can add more if you like.

Sample Values List: Authenticity, Adventure, Awareness, Balance, Beauty, Community, Compassion, Creativity, Curiosity, Discipline, Empathy, Family, Friendships, Freedom, Fun, Gratitude, Growth, Health, Honesty, Humility, Independence, Intimacy, Intuition, Justice, Kindness, Learning, Love, Mindfulness, Nature, Optimism, Peace, Pleasure, Purpose, Relationships, Respect, Responsibility, Self-respect, Serenity, Service, Simplicity, Spirituality, Tolerance, Tradition, Trust, Wisdom.

Now go ahead with the following steps.

• Choose your top 10 values from the list. What is really important to you?

• Arrange them in order of importance

• Now imagine Mister Hurry-Culture as a person demanding you sacrifice your number one value (in order to be more productive, for example). What would you say?

• Write a “my north star values” script. 3-4 sentences about what you will absolutely not compromise, even when you are extremely under pressure.

• Keep that list as a daily reminder.

This exercise is meant to be a for clarity. And to provoke you. What do you stand up for?

What would you refuse to give up, even under pressure?

3. THE CHILDHOOD ARCHAEOLOGY

When you think back to your childhood, what were the things you loved to do, to be around, to immerse yourself in? What did you appreciate and cherish? What felt important to you? What kind of TV shows did you like as a kid, which character trait could you identify with and why? What were their personalities? Are these characteristics and traits still part of who you are today? Did you forget about it?

Write it down and reflect on whether these things are reflected in your current life? Do you realize how important (or not important) they are for who you are or who you want to be?

For example, as a kid, I loved to play outdoors, in nature. I had lots of friends, and I also liked my alone time. When I reflect on that today, I recognize that one of my highest values today are friendships, as well as being connected to nature and that alone-time is very important for me to feel well and happy. I don’t compromise these important aspects (values).

4. THE MAGAZINE EXERCISE

Flip through various magazines (lifestyle, travel, interior design, fashion, special interest, etc.), or coffee table books and notice to what you react. What colors, styles, ideas, concepts, settings, places, people, words, topics. What sparks ideas, emotions, or things you identify with? And the opposite, to which things you cannot relate at all?

Absorb - and let it sink into your subconscious. Notice - and become aware of what reflects YOU. Over time you build a repository of informational and emotional mosaic pieces that inform you about your values, passions, styles and personality.

5. THE PERSONALITY CHECK

What kind/type of people/personalities give you a spark, energize, and inspire you? That can show you what kind of values and principles you seem to appreciate. And the opposite, what type of people and characters you can’t stand? What really annoys you about other people?

Your Payoff - What Becomes Possible

Knowing your north star, living by your code, is how you keep control in your own hands. You don’t let others decide over you.

Decisions about how to spend your time become easier, because you know what you value and what mattes to you, so that is your orientation for how to decide.
For example, in a busy workday I need some alone time, moving and being outside which are all high on my value list. So it was clear for me when working in a company structure that I would not spend my lunch break with colleagues in a café.

When knowing your values, you are much clearer about what you expect from a relationship, from your job, or how you spend your free time.

You are better equipped to say “No” or “Yes” to requests, demands, orders, services – because you have a compass guiding you.

You can create, build, do things aligned to your own demands and not according to other’s expectation.

In a rushing world that constantly tries to set your speed, your pace, your priorities knowing your values is the most radical act of self-ownership available.

The work of Un-Rush is helping you slow down enough to discover what you actually stand for. And then build your life and work from that center outward.

Hi, I’m Claudia, speaking to those who refuse to let the world set their speed and who want to reclaim what they’ve been too busy to notice they’ve lost. Together we will flip the script on hurry culture.

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!

You Wait For Permission To Slow Down From A World That Profits From Your Exhaustion

Here is what a friend told me. “For years, I ran at full speed, convinced I had to. Slowing down felt like failure. But once I stopped, I realized that I was kidding myself. Now, I move at my own pace, and, guess what, the world still turns without me hurrying like crazy.”

This is the paradox we are living in. The system keeps churning and turning, convincing us that we have to keep pushing the wheels or else it collapses. What it actually does is make us, the busy rats, collapse. On the other hand, that makes the wellness, pills, therapist, and coaching industry happy as they benefit from our exhaustion.

Your problem is that you wait for permission to slow down from a world that actually profits from your exhaustion. But the only permission that matters is the one you give yourself.

And this is the permission paradox. It’s like a catch-22. A logic loop that’s inescapable if you play by the rules. We can see it everywhere, in all kinds of fields. Accomplished professionals, loving parents, and helpful colleagues are waiting for someone else to tell them it’s okay to be who they really are. The kid waits for the parent to set them boundaries, but the parent waits for the kid to tell them what they want, or watch the kids push the rules way too far because they wait for you to stop them.

We are all differently wired. We can expect the best of each person if they live in sync with their own inner rhythm.

Why do we wait for external permission to show up fully in our own lives?

Waiting For External Validation

Do you really want to seek approval to rest from the very culture that made you tired?

The pace that’s being offered is inhuman. We don’t want to hear it, but we cannot be complete and full and expansive outside of our own human capacity. When do you realize that you’ve been waiting for external validation to live at your own pace? You know you feel, perform, create, care, build, and think better when you take the time to look and listen more closely. Yet, you feel guilty doing so.

If you fulfill everyone’s expectations by keeping busy, multitasking, and rushing through the day, everybody will nod their heads and agree that this is right. Yes, this is how we are supposed to live, no?!

But there is a right pace for everything. And slow means doing everything at the right speed: quickly, slowly, or whatever pace works best.

We all have our own pace and rhythms. We need to become aware of it, appreciate and value it, and work with that rhythm so our life and work become in sync with who we are. We need to respect and recognize others’ slow/fast pace and let them follow their rhythm.

Internal Act Of Power

The first step to changing your thinking habits is to become aware of them. Paying attention to yourself and noticing when others take control over your time, your actions, your space, your decisions, and your current state of well-being. You are so busy getting everything done that you let the world and people around you determine the pace at which you move. You give up control because that is easier in a frantic, spinning whirlwind of a day.

Permission to slow down comes from within, not from the outside.

You don’t need permission from the rushing maniacs to slow down and take time to think things through. You give yourself permission, based on your confidence that you know the inner rhythm that serves you best!

Just to clarify again: this is not about turning you into a turtle. This is about moving in a tempo that allows you to stay connected to yourself, to keep control over yourself, and not to hand control over your life to others or to blame “circumstances”. It is an internal act of power and self-trust.

And here is another irony: while you are waiting for permission to slow down, others are waiting for you to give yourself permission. Are you slowing down? Then the other can model what courage looks like if someone refuses the pressure and hurry.

Now comes the question what is holding you back. What are you really afraid of?

Your Fears

The fear of falling behind

“If I slow down, I’ll fall behind everyone else!” This is such a common feeling. It actually reminds me a bit of childhood or teenage years. You beg your parents to also get you the smartphone or that particular sneaker brand because EVERYONE else is having it. And you don’t want to fall behind. We continue this into adult life, where we so often feel stressed because we are falling behind. With the overwhelming number of options available today for how we can spend our time, our free time, our social life, and everything else in life, we are constantly exposed to the fear that we might miss out on opportunities.

The fear society doesn’t support slowing down

The way we work, our offices are set up, and the daily work and life schedule are constructed, shows that our current environment simply doesn’t support deep thinking, thinking things through before deciding, putting quality over quantity, or noticing the other person. We seem to live in a taboo zone against slowness. Just thinking about it makes us already feel guilty, worried, or afraid. We measure our worth by how busy we appear to others.

The fear that others will not understand

That’s how it always goes. The ones with new ideas, a different way of thinking, living, or doing things are met with incomprehension. “My boss, clients, family, and friends won’t accept me working or doing things at a slower pace. I get ridiculed.” Did you experience that? You feel guilty every time you rest, as if stillness is laziness. And you fear the social cost of being different.

The fear of economic pressure

We fear economic pressure and are trained to think that slowing down is “a luxury I can’t afford right now.” Which means that the economy actively works against the spiritual needs of most people, aiming to force us into cogs in the economic system. And so continues the cycle of pressure from hustle culture and constant expectations. Which actually does NOT make us any better cogs in the system.

As Cal Newport writes in his book Slow Productivity, “when an individual’s work volume increases, so does the accompanying overhead and stress, reducing both the time remaining to actually execute the tasks and the quality of the results. If you instead enable the individual to work more sequentially, focusing on a small number of things at a time, waiting until she is done before bringing on new obligations, the rate at which she completes tasks might actually increase.”

The fear that it’s not practical

You fear that slowing down is not practical. But it is getting really tiring in our ‘hurry up’ and ‘always-on’ culture that people expect the perfect solution now. Immediately. In professional contexts, speed is demanded. So, slowing down seems not doable or practical. And then we get tricked by our own impatience. We check our phones during moments of peace, unable to sit with ourselves.

The fear of internal resistance

Do you sometimes try to sit still and do nothing? Just sit. Still. With Yourself. People say they almost panicked when challenged to sit doing nothing.

“All man’s misfortune consists in this one thing, his inability to remain quietly in one room.” – Blaise Pascal

Can’t sit and do nothing, because I hate to waste time.

Can’t sit and do nothing, because it’s like pretending as if I had nothing to do, instead, I don’t know how to get it all done today.

Can’t sit and do nothing, because slowing down feels like failure.

Right? That’s how you feel about it. This internal resistance is real. Resistance is a beast. Resistance will always try to keep you from doing what you need to do or keep you from sitting still if that is what your mind tells you to do. Your resistance will fight against your mind. As Steven Pressfield writes in his book War of Art: “The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.”

The fear of having to face life issues

Rushing and hurrying are often instruments of denial and distraction. We don’t want to have a closer look into problems. Rushing helps avoid facing issues. Not dealing with what is going wrong in our lives. Distracting ourselves with speed and busyness is easier.

Is it really? Do you feel better about avoiding the problems in your life? Keep piling them up instead of slowing down, taking the time to remove or dissolve them? Which would result in fewer rocks in your way and more how-to-solve-life-issues tools in your toolbox.

Where are YOU in the whole picture?

Become Unburdened By Others’ Urgency

We learned about the different forms of fear that provide us with so many excuses to not slow down. We listen to a lot of external factors promoting speed and hurry, looking for permission to not hurry. But the permission you seek isn’t really about external validation. It’s about safety. You’re afraid that if you show up authentically, with your ideas, your needs, your boundaries, and your humanity, you will be rejected, judged, or cast out.

Self-permission is an act of power and self-trust.

“I have often thought about why we cannot just stop and collect ourselves for deep thinking, but the current environment simply doesn’t support this. I’ve finally decided to take this for myself, society be damned - I don’t need their permission.”

The benefits of moving at your own rhythm are that you get to choose your reality, and you tend to focus on your priorities. With more self-confidence in your own pace, it becomes easier to remove the rushing energy from your space. And to let people around you know that their pushing and pressuring is not making you move faster.

This is about setting your boundaries. Your mental, physical, and energetic boundaries. And here comes the most important part about setting boundaries: No one will respect your boundaries if you don’t!

The Trust Principle

Kimi Werner is a champion deep-sea diver, spearfisher, and freediver who had an experience where she swam toward the shark, not away, and it saved her life. And she could do that because she learned in her diving life, “when you feel the need to speed up, slow down”. This rule underwater had saved her from various incidents, and exactly that rule made her win many competitions.

Kimi trusted her own rhythm. Breathing and staying calm are her tools. She moves through the underwater world with trust instead of urgency and transfers that into her life on solid ground.

What is YOUR rhythm? Trust it.

Your Permission and Self-Authorization

You want to break free from needing external validation. And build confidence in your own rhythm. How do you give yourself permission to slow down?

We are constantly being pressured and rushed to do or consume things faster, and that benefits others more than ourselves. It helps to ask yourself: Do I really HAVE to do this? Do I really WANT to do this? To find the answer, it helps to be clear about your own life compass. Only when you know what is really important to you can you find the leverage and strength to make it happen. And give yourself permission to be aware of your pace.

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Your Revolution

Become someone who moves through life with unshakeable inner confidence.

You exercise the privilege of permission-giving too rarely.

Be someone who trusts their own rhythm so deeply that external pressure becomes irrelevant noise.

Actionable Steps

• Identify one area where you’re waiting for permission. Give it to yourself today. (I, for example, wait for permission to read. Irony is that it’s part of my work. I give myself permission today and all the next days to read the pages in the books that serve my work).

• Practice saying “I’m not available” without explanation or apology. (I stopped reacting and answering immediately to WhatsApp messages.)

• Create one non-negotiable slow ritual each day. Even if it’s five minutes. (mine is an hour long. Taking a walk in nature. Non-negotiable.)

• Notice when you feel the urge to justify your pace. Stop explaining.

The most radical act of self-trust is giving yourself permission to move at your own speed in a world designed to make you feel perpetually behind.

And the great thing about it: When you give yourself permission to un-rush, to embrace, appreciate, and live by your own rhythm, you give everyone around you permission to do the same.

The world still turns when you move at your own pace. The only question is whether you’ll be present for it.

Hi, I’m Claudia, helping you become accessible to yourself and others again,
amid the noise and hustle & bustle.

Curated brain food – in 3-Minutes

THINKING OUT LOUD.

The best way to be accessible to yourself and to others again is to give yourself permission to un-rush, based on confidence in your own inner rhythm.

You have to reset your life. You have to reset your mind. You have to let go of the illusion that speed is connected to productivity and success.

Then, something else can take this place. Some manage to do it. Because they figured the world still turns when they move at their own pace. You can be one of them.

It’s hard, but simple. You can restart any time you want. Any time you have the inner confidence. People don’t need permission from “rushing maniacs” to slow down; they give themselves permission based on confidence in their own inner rhythm.

It’s a feeling of freedom. Because you don’t want to live an unexamined life, carried by everyone else’s currents.

It is your choice. You can float through life focused on fitting in or figure out who you are and live by your own rhythm.

THIS INSPIRES.

In a time of constant spectacle and endless scale, we sometimes need to be reminded that wonder does not require magnitude.

Stress is not conducive for productivity. Brunello Cucinelli believes you need to bake in moments of relaxation in your day where you feel at peace. “I’ve always believed that the human being is more creative when he is at peace with humanity. Work at places and do business with people who inspire you to be the best version of yourself by treating you with dignity and respect. Nothing is more important for your own creativity and expression.” – Brunello Cucinelli, Italian luxury brand creator and “philosopher-designer”

“The very people, in short, who have worked to speed up the world are the same ones most sensitive to the virtue of slowing down.” - Pico Iyer

A RETREAT to UnRush.

If you feel like tapping into your power of slow, join us for the Un-Rush Retreat near the Italian Alps (Dolomites) in October 2026 (English Edition). (German Edition in June 2026).

This gathering is about giving yourself permission to find your inner rhythm that serves you best and to build greater trust in your power of slow. It’s also about opening up for an identity shift, going from doing to BEING. Un-rushing is not something we DO, it’s something we ARE.

Self-awareness and knowing yourself is liberating and empowering. It’s a form of freedom to be unburdened by weight of external expectations to hurry. Un-rushing is a way of moving through the world with trust instead of urgency.

I love bringing together inspirational and seeking minds to inspire each other and connecting like-minded souls for talking, thinking, and transformation. That’s why I create and curate this Retreat, together with project partner Markus, for those who want to calm down but also explore, and to build in community and in (guided) stillness.

A PLACE to UnRush.

Roadbook

I found this beautifully designed and curated platform for unconventional travelers. It’s a digital platform “driven by deep local insights and a relentless focus on quality, showcasing inspirational people, places and stories from around the world.” The content includes city guides, thought-provoking long reads, narrative photo essays and interviews with leading global tastemakers, uncovering the unique characteristics that make each city tick. ROADBOOK says it “aims to lead a discussion on the future of travel in a meaningful way.”

A PERSON who managed to UnRush.

Hanna Tempelhagen, long-distance running champion and Mindful Running Coach

It’s not about running faster and further.

You can run mindfully, which does not mean running slowly. It means running consciously. And you get further. In distance, with your mental strength, and with your joy in life.

Hanna Tempelhagen is one of the few long-distance runners who has managed to break the magical three-hour barrier in the marathon. As a coach in companies, she inspires not only managers, who are impressed by her discipline and endurance. But for the mindfulness teacher, it’s not about running faster and further, but about feeling exactly what happens in the body when running. Mindful running is meditation in motion. Mindfulness and body awareness exercises are combined before, during, and after running.

„Mindful running allows me to feel myself very intensely, become calm and relaxed, and recharge my batteries for challenging days. Mindfulness is an integral part of my life—especially in my daily training routine. As a competitive athlete, mindful running helps me to pay better attention to my body’s signals, complete intense training sessions with great focus, and perform at my best in competitions.“ - Hanna Tempelhagen, Mindful Running Coach

A PRESCRIPTION to UnRush.

How to switch out of “work mode” after a hectic day?

Sophie Morice, 60, guiding leaders to grow, says that she lives by a simple French mantra: work to live, not live to work. “I absolutely love my job, but after a hectic day, I make it a priority to unplug completely—whether that means stepping away from emails, spending time with loved ones, exercising, or enjoying a book, a movie, or music. I love to dance. This helps me recharge and maintain balance so that I can bring my best self to both work and life.”

The Offline Club

Like in the old times. Getting together and doing all the analog stuff you enjoy in the company of other real human beings. The Offline Club started in Holland and is spreading around the world. They are hangouts and events to unplug, relax, and connect with like-minded people. Offering a relaxing break from screens, distractions, and the daily rush. Its mission is to “swap screen time for real time”. And those who have signed up will be invited to a Zoom call on Saturday, where they will be given tips and tricks to survive the next day without the internet.

A BOOK to UnRush and stretch your perspective

Get Inspired by Japan

A wonderful coffee-table book on Japan, inviting readers to embark on a journey that celebrates the art of slowing down and entices them to seek the extraordinary within the ordinary.

Subscribe now

Hi, I’m Claudia, speaking to those who refuse to let the world set their speed and who want to reclaim what they’ve been too busy to notice they’ve lost. Together we will flip the script on hurry culture.

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 People Resist the Very Change That Could Save Them

Why is it so hard to help someone you care about? A dear friend of mine has a neurological disease, and his executive function for his small business is diminished. This had various implications for his business, and the strain and stress of the whole situation naturally do not help to improve or stabilize his health, which then impacts the business again - a vicious cycle. I so want to help him, but often feel helpless because, as a proud, self-reliant, and always taking care of family and business affairs by himself kinda guy, he blocks off a lot of help, advice, or input. It. Is. So. Frustrating.

We’ve all witnessed it: someone is trapped in an obviously unhealthy situation, yet when you offer help or suggest a path forward, they push back, make excuses, or sabotage their own progress. It’s maddening!

Not only in this particular situation that I am experiencing, but also when I look around, I constantly see that people seem to prefer their misery rather than trying to get out of it.

Why the hell is that?

I researched and found an uncomfortable truth: human resistance to change isn’t weakness or stupidity. It’s deeply rooted in our psychology, evolution, and brain chemistry. Great. So, what can we do?

Understanding why people prefer familiar misery over uncertain improvement requires exploring insights from different angles. For that, I wanted to consult Robert Greene’s observations on human nature (and I can recommend his book The Laws of Human Nature), the Stoic philosophy, Freudian psychology, and modern neuroscience. What I discovered is both humbling and hopeful: we’re all fighting these same invisible forces, and, as I conclude and convey through most of my other writings, AWARENESS (self-awareness) is the first step to breaking free.

Let’s first see what the studies on human nature, philosophy, psychology, and modern neuroscience have to say. Out of curiosity, I explored a bit more the modern neuroscience aspects of executive dysfunction and the self-fulfilling prophecy. Then we look at how to break free.

Read the full article

The following are some snapshots of the article.

Emotional Reactions Keep Us Stuck (And It Sucks)

In The Laws of Human Nature, Robert Greene describes humans having a lower self and a higher self. The lower self is stronger, constantly pulling us toward emotional reactions, defensive postures, immediate pleasures, and the path of least resistance. This isn’t a moral failing; it’s how humans are wired.

Not Change Itself Is The Problem (But Our Resistance To It)

The ancient Stoics understood something profound that modern psychology has recently confirmed: change itself isn’t the problem. Our resistance to it is.

When we suffer, we’re not suffering from circumstances. We’re suffering from our belief that circumstances shouldn’t be this way. We expect life to be fair, predictable, and comfortable. When it doesn’t, we dig in our heels, complain, and remain stuck rather than adapting.

We Actively Resist The Insights (That Would Free Us, Duh!)

According to Sigmund Freud, we actively resist the very insights that would free us. Sounds crazy to me. But I guess here is human nature and unconscious behavior at play.

When faced with threatening information about ourselves, we don’t confront it rationally. Instead, our unconscious mind deploys a defense mechanism such as denial, rationalization, projection, or a host of other defenses to keep that information at bay.

The Science Behind Staying Stuck (Our Brain, What Else!)

Modern Psychology and contemporary neuroscience have mapped the mechanisms that keep us trapped. Understanding and being aware of these can transform self-judgment into self-compassion and then turn compassion into effective action.

• The Brain’s Desperate Need for Consistency

• Learned Helplessness

• When the Brain’s Project Manager Goes Offline (Executive Dysfunction)

The Neuroscience of Fear and Familiarity

Briefly looking at the neurological level, it confirms that change represents a threat. The brain’s primary job is keeping you alive, and survival favors predictability. Novel situations require more cognitive resources and carry unknown risks. Even miserable circumstances become “safe” once the brain get used to them and calls them as survivable

Becoming What We Believe (Self-Fulfilling Prophecy)

Perhaps the sneakiest trap in the change-but-not-change spiral is the self-fulfilling prophecy, when our beliefs about ourselves create the very reality we feared (or wished). When you believe you’ll fail, you unconsciously act in ways that ensure failure.

Breaking Free From The Comfort Of Misery

Understanding the psychology behind staying stuck is enlightening, but practical actions are what create change and transformation.

Here’s how to overcome resistance in yourself and when trying to help others…..

Article The Comfort of Misery

Why is it so hard to help someone you care about? A dear friend of mine has a neurological disease, and his executive function for his small business is diminished. This had various implications for his business, and the strain and stress of the whole situation naturally do not help to improve or stabilize his health, which then impacts the business again - a vicious cycle. I so want to help him, but often feel helpless because, as a proud, self-reliant, and always taking care of family and business affairs by himself kinda guy, he blocks off a lot of help, advice, or input. It. Is. So. Frustrating.

We’ve all witnessed it: someone is trapped in an obviously unhealthy situation, yet when you offer help or suggest a path forward, they push back, make excuses, or sabotage their own progress. It’s maddening!

Not only in this particular situation that I am experiencing, but also when I look around, I constantly see that people seem to prefer their misery rather than trying to get out of it.

Why the hell is that?

I researched and found an uncomfortable truth: human resistance to change isn’t weakness or stupidity. It’s deeply rooted in our psychology, evolution, and brain chemistry. Great. So, what can we do?

Understanding why people prefer familiar misery over uncertain improvement requires exploring insights from different angles. For that, I wanted to consult Robert Greene’s observations on human nature (and I can recommend his book The Laws of Human Nature), the Stoic philosophy, Freudian psychology, and modern neuroscience. What I discovered is both humbling and hopeful: we’re all fighting these same invisible forces, and, as I conclude and convey through most of my other writings, AWARENESS (self-awareness) is the first step to breaking free.

Let’s first see what the studies on human nature, philosophy, psychology, and modern neuroscience have to say. Out of curiosity, I explored a bit more the modern neuroscience aspects of executive dysfunction and the self-fulfilling prophecy. Then we look at how to break free.

Emotional Reactions Keep Us Stuck (And It Sucks)

In The Laws of Human Nature, Robert Greene describes humans having a lower self and a higher self. The lower self is stronger, constantly pulling us toward emotional reactions, defensive postures, immediate pleasures, and the path of least resistance. This isn’t a moral failing; it’s how humans are wired.

And when challenged or offered help, our immediate response isn’t rational analysis, it’s defensive. Because we want to protect our ego, justify our current position, and find reasons why change won’t work for us specifically. We believe we’re being logical when we’re actually veering toward ideas that soothe our wounded pride.

Unfortunately, this happens unconsciously. We adopt others’ thinking and create elaborate rationalizations that feel like wisdom but are actually just defenses against the discomfort of change. The lower self whispers, “You’re fine as you are. The problem is them, not you.”

Not Change Itself Is The Problem (But Our Resistance To It)

The ancient Stoics understood something profound that modern psychology has recently confirmed: change itself isn’t the problem. Our resistance to it is. Reading Marcus Aurelius, you find this: change is essential to nature, and the universe operates on constant transformation. And Epictetus stated that it is not things themselves that disturb people, but the judgments they form about them.

When we suffer, we’re not suffering from circumstances. We’re suffering from our belief that circumstances shouldn’t be this way. We expect life to be fair, predictable, and comfortable. When it doesn’t, we dig in our heels, complain, and remain stuck rather than adapting.

The Stoics weren’t suggesting passive resignation. Their point is that you can either spend enormous energy resisting the inevitable, or you can accept what is and focus your energy on what you can actually control.

TRY THIS: When facing a difficult situation, separate fact from interpretation. For example: “I lost my job” is a fact. This one you have to accept. “This is terrible and unfair” is an interpretation. The one you can examine. Often, our resistance to reality creates more suffering than reality itself.

We Actively Resist The Insights (That Would Free Us, Duh!)

According to Sigmund Freud, we actively resist the very insights that would free us. Sounds crazy to me. But I guess here is human nature and unconscious behavior at play.

When faced with threatening information about ourselves, we don’t confront it rationally. Instead, our unconscious mind deploys a defense mechanism such as denial, rationalization, projection, or a host of other defenses to keep that information at bay.

And this becomes a wacko paradox. We seek help, we say we want to change, yet we resist the very process that could help us. Sigmund Freud called this “resistance” in psychoanalysis. Patients would come up with elaborate ways to prevent feelings or thoughts from reaching conscious awareness. And here’s the twist that explains why people stay miserable. Freud described it as “secondary gains” from illness. Sometimes maintaining our symptoms serves hidden needs. The chronic pain patient receives sympathy, an anxious person avoids responsibility, or a depressed individual gets attention. These are NOT CONSCIOUS manipulations! There are unconscious benefits that make change feel threatening.

This is how we become trapped: miserable in our current state, yet terrified of change.

TRY THIS: Ask yourself honestly: “What am I getting from staying stuck?” Sympathy? An excuse not to try? Acknowledgment of these hidden benefits is the beginning of genuine change.

The Science Behind Staying Stuck (Our Brain, What Else!)

Modern Psychology and contemporary neuroscience have mapped the mechanisms that keep us trapped. Understanding and being aware of these can transform self-judgment into self-compassion and then turn compassion into effective action.

The Brain’s Desperate Need for Consistency

Our brains seek psychological consistency between our expectations and the actual reality. When we get information that contradicts our beliefs or behaviors, we experience profound discomfort. To resolve this tension, we have three options: change our beliefs, change our behavior, or, and this is what most people do, rationalize away the contradiction.

Our brains are literally wired to resist change as a form of self-preservation. When faced with uncertainty, our fear center in the brain (the amygdala) activates, triggering fight-or-flight responses. The familiar, even when painful, feels safer than the unknown. Again, this is not conscious, but subconsciously.

Learned Helplessness

There is another psychological aspect: When giving up becomes automatic. Our subconscious learned that our efforts didn’t go anywhere, so feeling helpless conditions our behavior. When we learned that effort leads to failure, why bother? When individuals repeatedly experience situations they perceive as uncontrollable, they develop a deep belief that their actions don’t matter. This creates a devastating spiral: perceived lack of control leads to giving up, which leads to actual lack of control, which reinforces the original belief.

TRY THIS: Identify one small thing you can control today. Learned helplessness is reversed through experiencing tiny successes, not through massive overhauls. One successful action rewires the belief that trying matters.

When the Brain’s Project Manager Goes Offline

You might have heard about Executive Dysfunction. When I heard about it many years ago, I dismissed it and didn’t really take it seriously. Now, with my friend being tangled up in a neurological disease and my decade long learning about the mind and mindset, I am getting a different perspective. Turns out, not all resistance is emotional avoidance. Sometimes, people genuinely cannot initiate or follow through, even when they desperately want to. This is executive dysfunction. A condition affecting the brain’s cognitive and behavioral skills related to planning, managing, and executing tasks.

Executive dysfunction manifests as being unable to visualize the finished product, struggling to motivate oneself to start difficult tasks, getting distracted mid-task, or finding planning itself confusing and exhausting. People with conditions like ADHD, brain injuries, Parkinson’s Disease, or chronic stress often experience this.

Here’s the critical distinction: procrastination is “capable but unwilling”, you could do it but choose not to. Executive dysfunction is “willing but incapable”, you want to act but can’t organize the cognitive resources to begin. Telling someone with executive dysfunction to “just try harder” is like telling someone with a broken leg to “just walk better.” Doesn’t work. As simple as that.

Here is an example: a college student with ADHD, has a project due in two weeks. She genuinely wants to complete it and feels anxious about it constantly. But every time she sits down to start, her mind blanks. She can’t break the project into steps, doesn’t know where to begin, and spends hours in frozen anxiety rather than avoidance. Friends think she’s procrastinating; she feels like she’s drowning. The stress makes her executive function worse, creating a vicious cycle.

The Neuroscience of Fear and Familiarity

Briefly looking at the neurological level, it confirms that change represents a threat. The brain’s primary job is keeping you alive, and survival favors predictability. Novel situations require more cognitive resources and carry unknown risks. Even miserable circumstances become “safe” once the brain get used to them and calls them as survivable. Research shows that the stress hormone cortisol increases when uncertainty persists, making us more reactive and defensive. Instead of logically assessing change, we reject it instinctively as self-protection.

Your fear center in the brain (the amygdala) can’t tell the difference between leaving a bad relationship and encountering a predator. Both trigger “danger!” in your brain. When you feel overwhelming resistance, ask: “Is this actual danger, or is my primitive brain misinterpreting uncertainty as threat?”

Becoming What We Believe (Self-Fulfilling Prophecy)

Perhaps the sneakiest trap in the change-but-not-change spiral is the self-fulfilling prophecy, when our beliefs about ourselves create the very reality we feared (or wished). Self-fulfilling prophecy goes both ways. When you believe you’ll fail, you unconsciously act in ways that ensure failure. When you believe change is impossible, you don’t try, guaranteeing the outcome you predicted. “See? I knew it!”.

„Whether you think you can or think you can’t, either way you’re right.” – Henry Ford

Our beliefs become invisible architects of our reality: high expectations lead to high performance, or low expectations lead to poor outcomes.

TRY THIS: Identify your self-narratives: “I’m not good at...,” “I always...,” “People like me never...” These aren’t truths! You were not born with this self-talk you tell yourself. They’re predictions you’re unconsciously fulfilling. Practice to act as if a different narrative were true for one week. “What would someone who is good at this do?” Then do that. Your behavior influences outcomes more than your “true nature.”

Breaking Free From The Comfort Of Misery

Understanding the psychology behind staying stuck is enlightening, but practical actions are what create change and transformation.

Here’s how to overcome resistance in yourself and when trying to help others:

Create a Safe Setting

Resistance decreases dramatically in environments where people feel safe to make mistakes, ask questions, and admit uncertainty. Fear of embarrassment or criticism activates the exact brain systems that make change impossible.

Give yourself or the other permission to fail, look foolish, or do it imperfectly.

Start Absurdly Small

The most common mistake in change efforts is starting too big. Overwhelm triggers resistance. Instead, identify the smallest possible action that moves you forward.

For example, not “get in shape”, but “put on workout clothes.” Small wins rewire the brain’s belief in your own power.

Identify your goal, then break it into steps. Take the first step and make it so small it seems ridiculous. Do only that. Tomorrow do the next small thing. Each tiny success makes the next action easier.

Examine the Story You Tell Yourself

We all have narratives about ourselves and our situations. And we often don’t question them. Write down the story you tell yourself about why you can’t change. Then challenge every single statement as if you were a detective looking for evidence. For example, “I’m too old.” Really? Is there one person your age who has done this? I am sure there is.

Take your biggest excuse for staying stuck and find three counter-examples. They don’t have to be perfect matches. Just evidence that your story is not a universal truth (or straight-up bullshit).

Involve Yourself in the Solution

If change is imposed on you by others, your resistance is higher than if you decide for some change. Then you are more invested and commit to it much easier. And if someone else is pushing change on you, ask for input: “I hear what you’re suggesting. Can I propose how I’ll approach this?”

What is helpful is when you’re contemplating a change, write down: “My way of doing this would be...” You want to “own” the method of how you approach the change, no matter if change was forced on you or you decided for it.

Build External Structure

For executive dysfunction or when willpower isn’t enough, create a surrounding structure that will help you to move forward. For example, put your running shoes by the bed, or delete the apps that waste your time, or schedule the appointment before you can talk yourself out of it.

Find Your “Why” Beyond Yourself

The most powerful change and motivation comes from having a purpose, a WHY for yourself that is larger than personal comfort. When change serves something you value deeply, your resistance diminishes because “Your Why”, the bigger meaning overrides fear.

Facing a difficult situation and change, keep asking yourself why does that matter? Keep asking over and over again, until you hit something that makes you emotional. That’s your real WHY.

Celebrate Evidence of Progress

Our brains are wired in a way that it will always try to focus on every setback while ignoring progress. Actively counteract this by documenting wins, no matter how small. You took your first step toward change? That’s evidence you’re not helpless. You tried and “failed”? That’s evidence you’re willing to be uncomfortable and cope with it.

Try every evening to write down one piece of evidence that you’re changing. Not outcomes, just little actions. “I recognized when I was making excuses” counts as much as “I completed the task.”

Conclusion

Understanding why people resist change doesn’t eliminate the resistance, but it transforms how we relate to it. We’re not weak or damaged when we struggle with change. We’re human, navigating ancient brain systems in a modern world that demands constant adaptation.

Finding out all of these insights, I realized, OMG, yes, that is exactly how my dear friend is reacting and responding to his dire situation. So far, I was indeed thinking, how can such a logical, hard-working person be so irrational and not take the logical steps that seem clear? But my friend’s reaction and behavior are kind of “normal”. It’s human. All humans are wired that way. We need to become AWARE of it. And re-wire our brains, one small step at a time. In my friend’s case, his neurological condition amplifies many times over the human nature of resisting the very change that could save him.

Become a free or paid member of the Un-Rush movement.

Here are the benefits you unlock with a paid membership to Un-Rush: The Power of Slow

• A deeper dive into the stories of successful slowing down concepts

• Access to an online community of like-minded slow-power rebels

• Pre-invites to in-person events (think Gathering-Retreat on un-rushing at a historic farm in northern Italy, or dinner nights connecting with a community of different thinkers)

• Supporting this work

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Hi, I’m Claudia, helping you face a hurried world
with greater confidence in your “Power of Slow”.

Give yourself permission to unfold at a more human speed!

Your problem is that you wonder why you should slow down when everyone else seems to speed and hurry.

This is the issue: Slowing down has a bad image.

Here is the solution: What if you start questioning that bad image and the speed with which you move through your days and life?

You might realize that slowing down is the force that moves the needle forward.

Despite the hurry, pressure, and chaos, it is possible to stay grounded and live according to your own rhythm. Reconnecting with the qualities and values that boost your self-confidence will help you find your own pace in life.

And for that, you have to start from the inside out.

You change the speed in your life when you gain a different perspective on yourself and a different outlook on life. Who you are as an individual comes down to where you choose to place your attention. But here’s what often happens: we let outside forces influence us, forgetting that we’re the ones in control of our thinking, feeling, and actions.

The question is not HOW to slow down. The question is WHY you might want to trust your own rhythm.

It’s about being the person who is in sync with oneself.

So, let me ask you this: Are you currently absorbing life, or is life absorbing you?

Do you want to slow down enough to figure out who you are and what is important to you, so you can reconnect with yourself and manage to return to your true self?

For this, you need to ask yourself the tough questions. The ones you avoid because you know the answer isn’t what you want to find out. And that’s when the magic happens. Because urgency and resorting to easy questions will not take you where you’re looking to go.

I compiled a Question Toolkit for you with 48 Prompts to help you uncover your personal rhythm in a world that demands constant speed. We are all unique and have each our unique life mosaic. That’s why I provide you with a wide range of questions to choose from, allowing you to focus on the ones that resonate with your personality and life vision.

The Question Toolkit

The questions are organized into different categories, such as

• Questions that make you think for a moment…

• Questions that go deeper to find out more about who you are…

• Questions about your values…

• Questions regarding who controls you…

• Questions revisiting if your actions align with your personal rhythm

• Nudges to push your imagination…

• Checking in with yourself if you are ready to rebel against the hurry and pressure…

The value lies in the depth and the fact that you can always return to the list and review.

What You’ll Walk Away With.

• Getting clear on what you want. And what you don’t want.

• Becoming aware if your life is absorbing you or if you absorb life.

• Rediscovering yourself well enough to move at your own rhythm, regardless of external pressure to speed up or slow down. That’s your rebellion.

• Allowing yourself to gain a new perspective on your life and the circumstances in which you find yourself.

• Understanding yourself deeply enough to trust your natural rhythm

Hi, I’m Claudia, helping you become accessible to yourself and others again,
amid the noise and hustle & bustle.

Curated brain food – in 3-Minutes

THINKING OUT LOUD.

The power of slow brings you back to the root of who you are: a person with focus, awareness, attention, and a conscious mindset.

NOTICING SYMPTOMS OF RUSHING

• Clumsiness.

• Driving yourself mad, quite literally, with urgency.

• Having a strong feeling of guilt when tempted to slow down.

• Expecting the perfect solution now for no other reason than to just “get it over with”.

• Forgetting your loved one’s birthday.

• Feeling guilty of being busy constantly.

Photography is one way to slow down and focus on our humanity - but it’s not the camera lens that matters: it’s the act of paying attention.

How connected are you to yourself so you walk at your own rhythm through your days?

THIS INSPIRES.

“When we are mindfully aware of our surroundings, we are doing photography, even if we don’t have a camera with us.” – John Suler, psychologist, writer, photographer.

“Photography defines your relationship with the world — it defines you. Through photography, you understand who you are.”- Vincent Peters, photographer

“As I travel the world, one of the greatest surprises I have encountered has been that the people who seem wisest about the necessity of placing limits on the newest technologies are, often, precisely the ones who helped develop those technologies, which have bulldozed over so many of the limits of old. The very people, in short, who have worked to speed up the world are the same ones most sensitive to the virtue of slowing down.” - Pico Iyer, author, travel journalist

“Life opens itself up to you in ways that one can’t possibly imagine when you are doing nothing. This is the greatest medium of them all. When I was doing nothing, I dreamt up some of my most important ideas.” - Marina Abramović

A PLACE to UnRush.

ENEA Tree Museum in Switzerland

The Enea Tree is located in a breathtakingly beautiful 75’000 m2 park close to Lake Zürich and features approx. 50 trees, representing more than 25 varieties, some are over 100 years old, creating an aura of eternity and tranquility. On the entire Enea Landscape Architecture complex, there are over 3000 exclusive trees and shrubs. Since 2013, contemporary sculptures by renowned artists have also been exhibited in the park and its surroundings. These works of art enter into a subtle dialogue with the gardens and expand the overall design concept of Enea.

A PERSON who managed to UnRush.

Magdalena Ponurska – rewriting and rewiring her life

In my quest to find people who successfully managed to slow down and create a life and work that fit with their personal rhythm, I discovered a successful businesswoman who dared to tap into her power of slow. Magdalena Ponurska from Courage to Create on Substack. Her work life kept her too busy, missing out on experiencing her son growing up. One night, she got so fed up with herself for missing her six-year-old son’s performance, once again, and about a picture he drew in art class of his mother on the phone, not looking at him, that it pushed her over the edge to change something.

She asked herself this question: “What if I became the kind of parent who never missed another performance?” Her 20-minute writing experiment made her go deep to answer this question, which kicked off a sequence of changes. It slowed down her life, based on becoming aware of her values and what matters to her. She resigned from her well-paid corporate job, started a writing/coaching business, and spent time with her son. She realized what was missing in her life: “When a kid’s face lights up because he wants to share something with you and he knows—actually knows—you’ll be there.”

Magdalena had asked herself some tough questions. She started from the inside out. You need to take a moment for this. Pause. THAT is the POWER of slow.

A PRESCRIPTION to UnRush.

Grandma Hobbies

Grandma Hobbies….It’s a thing. Seriously.

In our rushing world filled with constant pressure, the value of traditional activities, like gardening, knitting, drawing, quilting, or crochet clubs, is gaining more attention. They got named Grandma hobbies, which doesn’t sound too sexy. But they do help reduce stress levels, foster social connections, and have a positive impact on your health, as research suggests. Which makes it sexy again. And there is indeed a resurgence of interest in these slow-paced pastimes among Gen Z – indicating how we feel about our hectic life, the non-stop scrolling and screen time, and our wellbeing and community.

So, pick your Grandma hobby and get your stress levels down!

A BOOK to UnRush and stretch your perspective

The Discovery of Slowness - by Sten Nadolny

At first glance, The Discovery of Slowness is at once a seafaring novel, a novel about adventure and the longing for it, and a coming-of-age novel. However, Sten Nadolny has rewritten the biography of the English sailor and North Pole explorer John Franklin (1786–1847) into a subtle study of time: slowness as an art form that gives meaning to the rhythm of life. Originally published in German in 1987, the book has been translated into all world languages and has since become a modern classic of German-language literature.