Empty Time
My father spoke beautifully about presence. The recordings he left behind are full of careful attention to the texture of things, the kind of speaking that makes you feel someone has actually looked at the world. He was also absent. Not as contradiction, exactly, just as the thing that was simultaneously true. Spiritual vocabulary doesn't determine what you build with it. It runs through character and comes out as something specific.
I think about that a lot now, trying to figure out what I'm building with mine.
There's an architecture that builders rarely map out, possibly because doing so is uncomfortable. The first layer is meaningful work: jobs where what you build and why you build it point the same direction. The second is formative experience: retreats, grief, the years in a new country, anything that cracks open your sense of what's possible. The third is awareness itself: the accumulated practice of noticing, the slow development of a relationship to your own mind.
Each layer is real. Each one is insufficient on its own. And each has a failure mode that looks exactly like success.
I used to work on edtech, software helping people learn English and access opportunities they wouldn't otherwise have. The work and the meaning pointed the same direction. That coherence was doing quiet spiritual duty, and I didn't notice it at the time because I didn't need to: the duty was being done. I've since moved into building agents for financial institutions. The work is genuinely interesting. The meaning no longer comes included. The guilt about that is its own data point.
A ten-day Vipassana cracked something open. Real and disorienting, the way things are when they're actually working. The silence, the body scan hour after hour, the way thought starts to look different when you've been watching it long enough. I came back changed, or feeling changed, which seemed the same thing for about two weeks. Then the calendar filled back in and the feeling became a memory and the memory became something I mention when the conversation calls for it.
My father died earlier this year. The grief arrived enormous, the kind that briefly makes the ordinary texture of a day feel precious. Within weeks I was back in planning mode, thinking about agent orchestration and infrastructure decisions. The grief is still there. It's running underneath rather than through everything. The confrontation keeps arriving. The return keeps not quite happening.
The critic Emily Segal has a phrase for what the failure of return looks like from outside: tasteslop, "cultural capital after extraction, after it's been through the blender." The signals of cultivated attention without the accumulated years that give them content. A Vipassana in your bio. The right books on the shelf. The vocabulary of inner work deployed fluently in conversation. I've done all of this. The experiences were real. Something about the integration step keeps not completing.
The structural reason isn't mysterious, it's just rarely named as a structural reason. Integration isn't a practice you add to a full schedule. It's what happens in the gaps: genuine unstructured time where a formative experience settles, connects to something, finds its way into how you see what you're making. Those gaps get filled. Not through malice but through a combination of ideology (the gap is waste, the tool fills the gap, the tool is always available) and cultural pressure: the mythology of the builder runs on pure outward velocity, and the language of inner integration lives in a different register that reads as soft, therapeutic, not serious. The two things that need to connect are in different dialects, and crossing between them carries a cost.
This is what the 60s counterculture got right that most of its successors have missed. The idea wasn't just that making things is spiritual; it was that the making and the practice had to be the same activity. Kobun Chino Otogawa, who was Steve Jobs's Zen teacher for decades and officiated his wedding, described Jobs's approach to design and his sitting practice as indistinguishable. The attention you bring to the form of an object is the same practice as the attention you bring to sitting. You don't separate them.
Bob Weir in the same era sounds almost identical in the interviews: the impermanence, the ego dissolution, the idea that the music doesn't come from the band but through it when conditions are right. Same vocabulary, completely different architecture. Weir built an open commons. The Dead let anyone tape everything, played three-hour sets where nothing needed to resolve on schedule, made the communal experience itself the point. Jobs built a locked garden. The spiritual language was real in both cases. What they built depended on who was doing the building, and what they'd actually let the practice do to them.
The post-rationalist and meaning-crisis world has the closest spiritual DNA to this tradition right now. Vervaeke, Schmachtenberger, the stranger corners of the rationalist diaspora: real contemplative seriousness, genuine suspicion of late-modern flatness. The diagnosis is good. But the output is analysis. Nobody has taken that worldview into a room and built something from it. The tradition that produced Jobs was fused with making. This one is fused with words about making. You can absorb all of Suzuki Roshi and still produce tasteslop. The vocabulary isn't the practice.
There's a fourth layer I've been circling. For a lot of builders, the act of making is the practice. The absorption of a problem that won't yield at 11pm. The flow state of DJing. The hours lost writing. That state does real contemplative work, maybe the closest thing to a sustained practice that most builders actually manage. I've felt it. It's genuine.
What AI tools are doing to that layer is worth sitting with. The resistance of a hard problem was never purely obstacle. It was the thing that forced you to form a precise picture of what you wanted, hold that picture against reality, and have reality tell you whether you were right. Across thousands of those low-grade confrontations, you develop something adjacent to taste: a sense of when something is done rather than just finished. Vibe coding delivers finished. The sense of complete is somewhere else, and the elsewhere is getting harder to find.
I wrote in an earlier essay about theater of process: the visible procedure that is behaviorally indistinguishable from the genuine article, in which the underlying state-change was never entered. The essay was about AI scratchpads and flight attendant burnout and expressive writing. But I kept thinking, writing it, about the Vipassana. About all the things I've done that look like integration from the outside and feel, from inside, like the form of the thing without the event itself.
Jobs spent decades with Kobun Chino. Mostly invisible, mostly unglamorous, no deliverables. The Whole Earth Catalog had years of protected obscurity in which to become what it became. The equivalent today, if they exist, probably knows better than to announce themselves into an attention economy that prices your signal before you've finished forming. They're in the group chats that don't want to be found, letting the grief or the retreat or the childhood across many countries actually finish its work before picking up the tool again.
Writing this is not that. I know that. Whether naming the gap precisely enough is a step toward crossing it, or whether it's the whole activity, is a question I genuinely can't answer. I've written enough essays about the dangers of accurate self-description substituting for change that I'm aware of the irony. The question is still alive. That has to mean something.
The gaps are still there, if you protect them. The empty time still does its work, if you let it. The practice is still available in the making, if you keep enough friction in the making to make it matter.
I'm still figuring out how to do all three.