Recently, I’ve noticed a shift that isn’t reflected in either the performance reports or the health trend summaries. It’s quieter than that. More personal.
People are beginning to view peace not as something they will earn when life slows down, but as something they actively choose right now, in the midst of it all.
Don’t worry like rejection. Do not rest, as at discharge. But peace as a deliberate refusal to give in to the urgency that modern life introduces into every hour of the day.
I noticed this shift in myself a few years after moving to Saigon. The city is a beautiful chaos: motorbikes hurtling through intersections with no apparent logic, street food stalls materializing at 6am, plans dissolving and re-forming without warning. You either struggle with it or gradually learn that control was an illusion you maintained at great personal cost.
This lesson took longer than I’d like to admit. But it’s the same lesson I see more people coming to, even from the comfort of a quiet life: Urgency is mostly the story we’ve inherited, and serenity is what happens when we stop telling it.
What is “modern relevance” really.
Before we can give up on something, it helps to clearly name it.
Modern urgency is not the same as true busyness. A real job is real: deadlines, responsibilities, people who need things from you. It exists. By urgency, I mean something else. It’s an atmospheric feeling that you should always be doing more, moving faster, optimizing harder, and that any moment of stillness is a moment wasted.
This manifests as a compulsion to check your phone before your feet touch the floor. The guilt of sitting down with a coffee and not listening to a podcast. The low-level panic that follows a sluggish day. A sense that rest must be earned and that peace is a reward, not a right.
This urgency most often does not come from your actual circumstances. It comes from the architecture of modern attention: apps built to reward constant engagement, a work culture that confuses accessibility with dedication, and a self-improvement industry that’s built on the premise that you’re always not enough.
Peace in this context is not passive. Choosing is an act of mild rebellion.
A Buddhist framework that really helps
There is a concept in Buddhism that fits this surprisingly well: daddy. This roughly translates to mental sprawl, the mind’s tendency to take one moment and turn it into a complicated story about the past, the future, what it means, what you should do, what could go wrong.
The urgency that most of us feel on a daily basis is papañca in overdrive. The present moment is fine. The pressure comes from all the stories superimposed on it.
Buddhist practice does not require you to eliminate thought. He asks you to notice when you do, and gently return to what is really here. Noticing it over and over again is practice. And that proves to be very subversive in a culture that profits from your distraction.
The Eightfold Path, which I’ve written about before, offers a framework for ethical and mindful living that is not so much religious as it is practical. Right intention, right effort, right mindfulness. These are not commandments. These are clues to the question: Am I reacting automatically, or am I really choosing to do so?
Why are more people coming here now
I don’t think it’s a trend in the lifestyle magazine sense. I think it’s a response to a certain kind of exhaustion.
The past few years have spawned a collective backlash against restrictions. Performance limitations, hustle, the idea that optimizing your schedule can fix a deeper anxiety. People who aspired to any efficiency and still felt empty began to question the premise, not just the execution.
At the same time, there is a quiet accumulation of evidence that silence works. A large multi-site study published in Nature Human Behavior found that even single self-administered mindfulness exercises markedly reduced stress in a variety of populations. Not a meditation, retreating level of commitment. Only short, deliberate pauses.
This is important because the entry barrier is low. You don’t need a pillow, a teacher, or a certain belief system. You just have to stop for a moment and say it seriously.
What does this refusal look like in practice
Here I want to abandon a version of this idea that softens into something decorative.
Choosing peace is not like scented candles and slow mornings (although neither is a problem). In most lives it looks like friction. You don’t seem to be replying to the message right away when all you want to do is clear the notification. It sounds like you’re sitting with the discomfort of an unfinished to-do list rather than pushing through the exhaustion to finish it. It’s like letting a conversation end without the last word.
I run most mornings in the Saigon heat, partly for fitness and partly because there’s something about willingly choosing to be physically uncomfortable that recalibrates your relationship with discomfort in general. You stop running from it. You realize that you can be present with him without defining the moment.
This is what it feels like from the inside to consciously let go of urgency. Not the lack of pressure, but a different relationship with it.
Counterargument: Isn’t that just a privilege?
Here you should sit with a push-up, because it is not wrong.
There are people for whom urgency is not a story, but a reality. Financial pressures, caring responsibilities, unstable work, health crises. The idea of ”choosing peace” can sound tone-deaf when you’re genuinely fighting for things to be together.
When I was in my early 20s, I was working in a warehouse feeling lost and empty, not because I was going through a crisis of survival, but because I was going through a crisis of meaning. I know the difference is important. And I know that not everyone has access to the same conditions of peace.
But here’s what I’ve come to think: the practices that make peace possible are at their most useful, very small. The Vietnamese cafe culture I fell in love with in Saigon required neither money nor free time. All that was required was the habit of taking your time with coffee. Being somewhere, not going through it.
This habit is available in more circumstances than we realize. Not all, but more.
The basis for embedding rejection on normal days
Rather than a list of tips, I want to offer something closer to a sequence, a progression of small choices built up over time.
The first move is to notice. While I’m not changing anything, I’m just starting to see how often you’re in reactive mode: jumping between tasks before one is finished, scrolling while waiting for something, filling the silence because the silence seems like a problem to be solved. Just noticed.
The second step is the insertion of friction. Deliberately slowing down one thing a day. Make your morning coffee without looking at your phone. I go somewhere without headphones. These are not grand gestures. These are small pieces of evidence that you can exist without stimulation and nothing bad happens.
The third move is to build a “peace anchor”. One fixed point per day belonging to attendance. A five-minute seat. A walk. Drink something slowly. It doesn’t have to be long. What matters is that it’s consistent and that you really mean it while it’s happening.
The fourth move is the most difficult: learning to be with incompleteness. More urgency, if you trace it back, is a low tolerance for unresolved things. Unread emails, unanswered questions, unfinished projects. Peace does not demand that everything be done. It requires being okay with what is wrong.
What it changes (and what it doesn’t)
Let me be honest about the limitations.
Choosing peace as a practice will not solve structural problems. It won’t make your job any less demanding or your inbox any smaller. It won’t solve the real pressures of a complicated life. What it changes is the internal weather in these conditions.
In my own experience, the biggest shift has not been in circumstances. It was the amount of energy I stopped spending on fighting the present moment. The anxiety for me was mostly that the mind is constantly simulating something that hasn’t happened yet. Buddhist practice slowly and imperfectly taught me to return to what was actually in front of me. Not as medicine. As a habit. A thing you practice as a skill because the alternative is exhausting.
I think it’s happening more widely. People do not give up their lives. They reject the layer of manufactured urgency that sits on top of life and pretends to be life itself.
Longer weekly practice
Set aside twenty minutes once a week, not for meditation in any formal sense, but for a “slowdown audit.”
Sit down with a piece of paper and write down the answers to three questions: Where did I feel the most this week? What was I really afraid of at that moment (missing out, falling behind, being judged, something else)? And what would it actually cost me to slow down?
Most people find that the cost they feared was far less than the cost of stress and distraction. Seeing it on paper again and again is what gradually changes the reflex. You begin to catch the urgency before it overwhelms you.
2 minute practice
Pick a moment today when you’re usually in a rush or fill up the space with your phone. A few minutes between tasks, waiting in line, an afternoon break.
When that moment comes, don’t fill it. Just breathe. Pay attention to what is around you. Pay attention to how your body feels now, not what’s next, just now. When a thought comes with an agenda, acknowledge it and come back.
Two minutes. You are not achieving anything. That’s the point. You practice being here and not somewhere else, and that practice, done consistently, is what peace is really made of.
Common pitfalls
- Treating peace as a reward. Tell yourself you’ll slow down once the project is done, once the kids are older, once things get less busy. The busyness never ends. Peace applied only as a reward is mostly unenforced.
- Confusing calmness with passivity. Choosing not to be urgent does not mean choosing not to care or act. You can work hard, express yourself fully and still feel at ease in it. The two are not opposites.
- Converting practice into another optimization. Downloading apps, tracking meditation lanes, turning immobility into a performance metric. If your mindfulness practice is causing anxiety about whether you’re doing it right, something has gone awry.
- Waiting for a steady state. Peace is not something you achieve and keep. It’s something you come back to many times a day after being distracted. Giving back is practice.
- Thinking it requires silence or ideal conditions. Saigon is one of the noisiest cities I’ve ever lived in. Peace is what you build within the noise, not by avoiding it.
Simple takeout
- Modern urgency is largely a made-up feeling rather than an accurate reading of your actual circumstances. You may doubt it.
- Choosing peace is a practice, not a personality trait. It’s built through small, repeated refusals to let urgency run the show.
- Buddhism calls this mechanism well: most suffering comes from the mental spread on top of the present moment, not from the present moment itself.
- You don’t need silence to practice stillness. You need to get into the habit of coming back to the present, even if only briefly, even in the midst of chaos.
- The goal is not to feel calm all the time. It’s to stop wasting huge amounts of energy fighting the moment you find yourself.
- Start small. One moment in the day when you don’t fill the space. That’s enough for a start.
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