I don’t remember when I stopped being comfortable with silence.

It didn’t happen all at once. It was gradual, like most things that change you without asking permission. At some point the quiet stopped feeling like rest and started feeling like something to fill. And I got very good at filling it.

These days, the moment there’s a gap, any gap at all, I reach for my phone. Waiting for food to arrive. Riding in a car. Sitting in a room while someone else is busy. Even the thirty seconds before sleep, that small stretch of time that used to just be the end of the day, I fill it with something. A video. A story. A scroll through content I won’t remember in the morning.

I do it automatically. That’s the part that bothers me most. I don’t decide to do it. My hand just moves.

I noticed it properly for the first time when I was sitting alone at a warung waiting for my order, and I realized I’d opened and closed three different apps within the span of two minutes without finding anything I actually wanted to look at. I wasn’t bored exactly. I just couldn’t tolerate the absence of input. Like my brain had forgotten how to run without something feeding it.

And I sat there and thought: when did this happen?

The honest answer is that it happened slowly, over years, as the cost of stimulation dropped to zero. There’s always something available now. Always a video, always a notification, always someone somewhere producing content that will fill exactly the shape of whatever gap you’re trying to avoid. The infrastructure for distraction has never been more complete.

So we use it. Of course we use it. It’s frictionless and immediate and it works, in the short-term way that scratching an itch works, relieving the sensation without doing anything about the cause.

What I’m starting to understand, reluctantly, is that the silence I keep running from is actually where I live. The real version of me, not the one performing or producing or consuming, but the one that exists underneath all that, only shows up in the quiet. And if I never sit in the quiet long enough to meet him, I’m just outsourcing my inner life to an algorithm that doesn’t know me and doesn’t care.

I tried something small a few weeks ago. I left my phone in another room for an hour. Not as a dramatic digital detox, just an hour. And the first fifteen minutes were genuinely uncomfortable. I kept having the impulse to check something, and there was nothing to check, and that felt wrong in a way I couldn’t immediately explain.

But somewhere around minute twenty, something shifted. The discomfort settled. And in its place was this quieter awareness, of the room, of what I was actually feeling, of thoughts that apparently had been waiting to surface but couldn’t get through the noise.

Some of those thoughts were uncomfortable. That’s probably why I’d been drowning them out.

I’m not trying to romanticize silence or make this into a self-improvement story where I deleted all my apps and found inner peace. That’s not what happened and that’s not the point. The point is just that I noticed something I’d been avoiding noticing, which is that I’ve become afraid of my own company in a way I hadn’t consciously acknowledged.

And the silence, when I finally let it be there, turned out to be less empty than I expected.

More like a room I’d forgotten I had. Still mine. Just dusty from not being visited.