The Void

On a Train to Portugal

I'm writing this on a train. I'm on my way to Portugal for a week of golf with twenty friends from my club — seven days, six rounds, and no agenda beyond showing up and swinging. Nobody asked me to write anything. There are no deadlines, no briefs, no tasks to complete. And yet here I am, typing, because an idea arrived and I want to catch it while it's fresh.

This is the essay's own proof of concept. I'll get to that.

There is a space — I keep calling it "the void" — where ideas are conjured. Not generated. Not optimised into existence. Conjured. It's the space that opens when nothing is demanded of you. When your mind is free to wander without a destination, without a deliverable, without someone waiting on the other end.

The void isn't empty. That's the counterintuitive part. It feels like nothing is happening — you're staring out a window, walking a fairway, sitting in a departure lounge — but underneath, something is assembling. Connections are forming between things you didn't know were related. A conversation from last week meets an observation from this morning and suddenly there's something there that wasn't before.

I wrote in my last essay about Patrick Rothfuss and the sleeping mind — the part of you that understands without being told, that works while the waking mind is busy elsewhere. The void is where the sleeping mind does its best work. You can't force your way in. You can only create the conditions and then get out of the way.

What Holiday Actually Means

Here's what I've come to believe: the value of a holiday is not the absence of work. It's the presence of sovereignty. You become the master of your own time.

That sounds simple. It isn't. In a normal working week, your time is structured around someone else's needs. Meetings at nine. Standups at ten. A deadline by Friday. Even your free evenings carry the residue of it — the half-thought about tomorrow's tasks, the notification you shouldn't have checked. Your time is technically yours but it doesn't feel yours.

On holiday, that dissolves. You wake up when you wake up. You decide every hour. And within that freedom, something interesting happens: the things you choose to do carry a completely different weight. A walk is different when nobody told you to take it. A meal is different when you're not watching the clock. And — here's the part people miss — work is different too.

Voluntary vs. Obligatory

If I'm sitting on a terrace in Portugal and an idea hits me, and I open my laptop for an hour to sketch it out — that is not "working on holiday" in the way people mean it. That's freedom expressing itself. I chose this. The idea is fresh, I'm excited, and there's no one on the other end waiting for a deliverable. I'll close the laptop when I'm done and go back to whatever I was doing.

Now compare that to checking Slack because you're worried about falling behind. Or replying to an email chain because the culture expects you to be reachable. Same device. Same terrace. Entirely different experience.

The action is identical. The autonomy changes everything.

This is the distinction that gets lost in the "work-life balance" conversation. The question isn't whether you work on holiday. The question is whether the work was yours — whether it came from within or was imposed from without. Voluntary, inspired work in your own time is energising. Obligatory, fear-driven work in your own time is corrosive. The difference isn't in the activity. It's in the sovereignty.

When Work Becomes Play

Now flip it around. If sovereignty and freedom are what open the void on holiday — what happens when your work starts to feel that way?

I've been fortunate to experience this. When you're surrounded by smart, genuinely kind colleagues. When the pace is fast enough to be exciting but not so relentless that you can't breathe. When the people around you are people you'd actually choose to spend time with — not in the hypothetical corporate sense, but really. When you'd grab a drink with them. When you enjoy the banter. When solving problems together feels like play.

Something shifts. Work stops feeling like the thing you need a holiday from and starts feeling like the thing you'd do even if nobody paid you. The void starts opening during the workday. Not all day — there's still structure, still a 9-to-5, still tasks and meetings and deadlines. But within that structure, pockets of genuine creative freedom emerge. You find yourself thinking about problems in the shower not because you're anxious, but because you're interested. Ideas arrive over lunch. You have a conversation with a colleague that sparks something neither of you expected.

This is what I think true productivity actually is. Not output per hour. Not tickets closed or lines shipped. It's reaching the state where ideas come unbidden — where the void opens not because you escaped work, but because work itself became the kind of environment where the sleeping mind can operate.

And this brings me to something I believe deeply: fun is not a perk. Fun is the mechanism. It's not a team-building exercise bolted onto an otherwise grim culture. Fun is the thing that opens the door to the void. You don't discipline your way into a flow state. You play your way there. A workplace where people genuinely enjoy each other's company is not a "nice to have" — it's the precondition for the kind of creativity that actually matters.

Ideas Born in Free Time

This isn't just personal philosophy. There's a pattern, and it shows up across the stories of people who've built things that mattered.

Kevin Systrom was on holiday in Mexico when the idea for Instagram crystallised. He wasn't in a brainstorm. He wasn't at a whiteboard. He was playing with photography in his own time, experimenting with filters for fun, free from the structure of his day job. The void was open, and something walked in.

This is not a coincidence. It's the pattern repeating. Step away from structure, and the structure of something new reveals itself. Give the sleeping mind room, and it delivers what the waking mind couldn't force.

I think about my own small version of this. Right now, on this train, I have no obligation to be writing. I have golf clubs in the hold and friends waiting at the other end. But the idea arrived — about work, about culture, about the void, about what it means to truly own your time — and I wanted to catch it. In a week I'll come back. Maybe with more thoughts. Maybe with none. The point is that the conditions are right: sovereignty, fun, meaningful company, and absolutely zero pressure to produce.

If that isn't the void in action, I don't know what is.

The Sleeping Mind, Again

In my last essay, I wrote about open-endedness — how the best outcomes emerge not from rigid goal-chasing but from staying open to what arrives. I wrote about patience, and how the bottleneck is never the tool's speed but the pace of human thought. I wrote about the sleeping mind.

This essay is really about where the sleeping mind lives. It lives in the void. It lives in the unstructured hours, the aimless walks, the conversations that wander. It lives in cultures where people are free enough — and having enough fun — that their guard drops and the deeper kind of thinking can surface.

It also lives on trains to Portugal, apparently.

The void can't be scheduled. You can't put "have breakthrough idea" in your calendar. But you can protect the conditions that make it possible: take real holidays where you own every hour. Build or seek out a work culture where the people are good and the work feels like play. Let yourself be bored. Let yourself wander. And when something arrives — an idea, an impulse, a thread worth pulling — trust it enough to follow it, even if you're supposed to be on holiday.

The sleeping mind is always working. Your job is to stop getting in its way.

Unanswered Questions

What is the relationship between boredom and creativity? Is the void just productive boredom?
How do you build a culture that opens the void — can it be designed, or does it only emerge?
Is the modern obsession with "hustle" and "grind" actively hostile to the sleeping mind?
What would a company look like if it optimised for sovereignty over productivity?

The Void — On Work, Play, and Where Ideas Come From