The Space We Cannot Leave Empty

There is an old idea, usually associated with Aristotle, that nature abhors a vacuum. Modern physics has made that sentence far more complicated than Aristotle could ever have imagined, since a vacuum turns out not to be the absolute nothingness we once thought it was. Yet as a metaphor for human life, the idea remains strangely powerful, because empty spaces rarely stay empty. Neither do we.

When something disappears from our lives, something else usually moves in. When silence disappears, noise takes its place. When community weakens, substitutes for connection appear. When purpose becomes uncertain, achievement, consumption, entertainment or recognition rush in to occupy the space. Perhaps one of the defining struggles of our time is not that modern humans have nothing. It is that we have become extraordinarily good at filling ourselves with things that cannot actually satisfy us.

The world in which survival occupied much of life

Go back only a few centuries and the shape of an ordinary human life looked radically different. In England, life expectancy at birth was about 35 years in 1760 and around 40 by 1800. Over those same forty years, men's annual working time rose from about 2,576 hours to more than 3,300, according to economic historian Hans-Joachim Voth, who reconstructed working days from thousands of witness statements given in court. By 1870, workers in many industrialising countries still worked roughly 2,700 to 3,500 hours a year, and in many wealthy countries today that figure has been roughly halved (Our World in Data). Meanwhile, global life expectancy rose from about 32 years in 1900 to about 73 in 2023 (Our World in Data). This was not because everyone once died at 35, but because very high child mortality pulled the old averages down.

Survival occupied space. Disease, childbirth and uncertain harvests weighed on every life. The sheer physical labour of heating, washing, cooking and travelling filled much of the day, work that technology now quietly performs for many of us.

Yet we should resist romanticising history, or imagining our ancestors busy every single minute. Pre-industrial work often followed seasons, daylight and particular tasks, and historians such as E. P. Thompson have argued that it was the factory that brought the discipline of the clock. The real difference lies deeper: much more of life was structured by things outside the individual. The harvest arrived when the harvest arrived. Animals had to be fed, children cared for, the weather obeyed. Family, village and faith supplied rhythms, rituals and a larger story in which a human life made sense.

This could be restrictive. Some of those inherited roles maintained inequality and left little room for lives that did not fit. We should not wish our way backwards. But as those structures weakened, we gained freedom, and freedom created a question.

When purpose stops being inherited

For much of human history, a large part of identity was given rather than designed. You were born into a family, a place, often a religion, a social position and usually a fairly narrow range of possible occupations. Much of the answer to Who am I? existed before you were old enough to ask the question.

Modern life has transformed that. For millions of people, identity has become something to construct. What should I believe? Who should I become? What should my life look like by 30, by 40, by 50?

Our ancestors certainly suffered, but many of them did not face this almost infinite menu of possible selves. We have gained something precious: agency. Agency, however, carries psychological weight. Our ancestors did not always have to invent an identity, because much of it was handed to them. We gained the freedom to become almost anything, and with that freedom came an enormous question: what is actually worth becoming?

We gained leisure. Did we gain silence?

Consider one modern example. According to the 2025 American Time Use Survey, people aged 15 and older in the United States spent an average of 5.16 hours per day on leisure and sports. Even adults aged 35 to 44, often balancing work, children and ageing parents, averaged 3.89 hours.

At first glance, this is extraordinary. Compared with most of human history, millions of us possess something our ancestors desperately wanted: time not dictated by physical survival. But look more closely at what fills it. Of those 5.16 hours, 2.61 went to watching television, which is half of all free time spent on a single activity. Only about 0.35 hours, roughly 21 minutes, fell into the category "relaxing and thinking". Reading for personal interest took about 16 minutes a day (BLS).

This does not mean that television is bad or that thinking is automatically virtuous. It means something more interesting. We did not necessarily gain silence. We gained discretionary time, and then became extraordinarily efficient at filling almost every second of it.

The screen reaches far beyond the television. Globally, the typical internet user spends around 2 hours and 21 minutes a day on social media, according to GWI data reported in Digital 2025. That is more than sixteen hours a week. Over a year, it comes to more than 850 hours, close to two months of waking life.

Something historically unusual has happened along the way. For most of human history, boredom eventually arrived whether you wanted it or not. Today, silence often requires a deliberate decision.

The empty space became valuable

There is another dimension to this transformation that we rarely discuss: our unused attention is now economically valuable. Every empty minute is an opportunity for someone to show us something, sell us something, entertain us, outrage us, frighten us, or convince us that life would be better if we owned something we currently lack. The space that might once have held boredom, contemplation, prayer, conversation or simple observation has become commercial real estate, and someone is always competing to fill it.

The content entering that space does not merely occupy our time. It can also quietly redefine what we think is normal. How successful should I be? How beautiful should I look? How happy should I appear?

A systematic review and meta-analysis published in Body Image examined 83 studies involving 55,440 participants. It found a significant association between greater online social comparison and greater body-image concerns. Higher social comparison was also linked with eating-disorder symptoms and lower positive body image. These are associations, not proof that every hour on social media directly causes those outcomes, but the pattern is substantial enough to deserve attention.

The comparison is so powerful because we rarely compare our entire reality with someone else's entire reality. We compare our Monday morning with their holiday, our argument with their anniversary photograph, our insecurity with their best angle, our unfinished life with their edited moment. The result is a strange psychological economy. People who possess more than almost any generation before them can still experience themselves primarily through what seems to be missing.

Connected everywhere. Known nowhere.

There is another paradox. Human beings have never had such powerful technologies for communication, yet connection itself remains fragile. In 2025, the WHO Commission on Social Connection reported that approximately one in six people worldwide experience loneliness. The World Happiness Report 2025 added a striking figure: in 2023, 19% of young adults worldwide said they had nobody they could count on for social support, a 39% increase since 2006. The same American time-use data tells a quieter version of the story. On an average day, people spent about 35 minutes socialising and communicating, against more than two and a half hours in front of the television.

These numbers should not be reduced to "social media causes loneliness", because human relationships are far too complicated for that. But they expose an important distinction: communication is not the same thing as connection. A person can receive hundreds of notifications and still have nobody to call at 2 a.m. A person can have thousands of followers and still wonder whether anybody truly knows them. We have solved distance extraordinarily well. We have not necessarily solved belonging.

Frankl gave the emptiness a name

Long before smartphones, Viktor Frankl described something remarkably close to this problem, and he called it the existential vacuum. For Frankl, human beings do not merely seek pleasure or power. We seek meaning, and when that search is frustrated, emptiness, boredom and a sense of meaninglessness can follow.

Modern research does not prove every element of Frankl's philosophy, but the link between perceived meaning and wellbeing continues to attract serious study. A UK study of 891 participants, designed explicitly to test Frankl's ideas, found that meaning in life remained associated with greater life satisfaction even after controlling for positive and negative affect. More recently, a study in Psychiatric Quarterly developed a scale to measure the existential vacuum directly, drawing on data from 28 countries. It found that existential emptiness was strongly connected with depression, anxiety, stress and lower mental wellbeing. It also found that people who feel life lacks meaning tend to tolerate uncertainty less well and to feel lonelier.

Perhaps this is where the modern problem becomes clearer. We removed many things that once filled human life through necessity, and much of that removal was magnificent progress. We reduced disease and conquered many forms of hunger. We automated physical labour, extended childhood, created retirement and broadened education. We gave millions of people choices their ancestors never had. But when necessity leaves a space, meaning does not automatically enter.

Something else can.

Almost anything can become a filler

We usually recognise destructive fillers once they become extreme: alcohol, drugs, pornography, compulsive consumption, endless scrolling, gambling. But there are more respectable fillers too. Work can fill the vacuum, and so can achievement, fitness, money, productivity and recognition. Even the constant pursuit of self-improvement can become another way of avoiding the uncomfortable question underneath it all: what is all this improvement actually for?

That is why removing a destructive behaviour, by itself, sometimes changes less than we expect. The space remains, and empty space invites replacement.

This is where an ancient biblical image becomes surprisingly relevant. In Matthew 12:43–45, Jesus tells of an unclean spirit that leaves a person and later returns to find the "house" empty, swept and put in order. The warning is unsettling precisely because the house is not dirty. It is clean, but empty. The principle reaches well beyond the immediate context of the passage. Removing what harms us is not always enough, and something worthy must eventually take its place.

Do not merely stop scrolling: what will replace it? Do not merely remove an addiction: what will give meaning to the life underneath it? Do not merely abandon a toxic ambition: what will you build instead? Do not merely disconnect: who will you reconnect with? Do not merely silence the noise: what will you listen for when silence finally arrives?

Maybe the goal was never to eliminate the vacuum

Perhaps we have misunderstood emptiness. We treat boredom as something to escape. We reach for the phone while waiting thirty seconds for an elevator, add headphones to a ten-minute walk, watch something while eating, and scroll while watching something else. Even the smallest spaces are being filled.

A series of experiments published in Science in 2014 showed how uncomfortable that emptiness has become. Participants were asked to spend 6 to 15 minutes alone in a room with nothing to do but think, and most did not enjoy it. In one version of the study, 67% of men and 25% of women chose to give themselves a mild electric shock rather than simply sit with their thoughts, even though they had earlier said they would pay to avoid that shock.

Perhaps that is why the answer is not simply to fill the space with better things, at least not immediately. Farmers once knew something many of us have forgotten. A field planted every season without rest eventually gives less, so they left it fallow for a time. The field was not abandoned, only deliberately kept unsown so the soil could recover. The Law of Moses even built this into the calendar: every seventh year, the land itself was to rest (Leviticus 25:4).

I believe human attention needs the same thing, and I would call it fallow space. It means emptiness kept on purpose. It is not the vacuum that whatever comes first will seize, but a space we guard long enough to discover what truly belongs there. A vacuum and a fallow field are both empty; the difference is whether anyone is tending the emptiness. The house in Matthew 12 was clean, empty and unguarded. A fallow field is empty and tended.

In my own life, fallow space has two familiar shapes. The first is my morning prayer. I do not begin it with words or requests, but in silence, simply breathing, with gratitude already in my heart, and only then do the words come. The second belongs to weekend mornings, when I go out for a walk alone, just me, myself and Heaven. Nothing is scheduled into that time and nothing is asked of it. Yet it is precisely there that I feel gratitude most clearly, along with a quiet contentment that gives energy rather than taking it. I return from those walks with more than I left with, although I brought nothing back except what the silence had room to give.

So perhaps some emptiness should remain empty for a moment. It need not stay empty permanently, only long enough for us to discover what belongs there. Reflection needs space. Prayer needs space. Grief needs space. Creativity, meaning and other people need space. God needs space too. This is not because He is absent until we invite Him in, but because a life filled wall to wall with noise can become remarkably poor at noticing what has been present all along.

Maybe silence feels uncomfortable precisely because it removes the things that protect us from ourselves. And perhaps that is exactly why we need some of it.

What are you feeding the space with?

A century ago, enormous parts of human life were occupied by necessity. Today, more and more of us get to decide what occupies them. That is one of the great achievements of modern civilisation, and it may also be one of our greatest responsibilities.

The answer is probably not to reject technology, abandon comfort or romanticise the hardships of our ancestors. The answer is intention, and the courage to leave some of our space fallow. That means choosing presence over automatic distraction, real people over audiences, service over endless self-observation, purpose over permanent performance, moments of silence over continuous input, and faith over comparison. The issue is not simply what we remove from our lives, but what we allow to replace it.

We have added decades to human existence, reduced working hours and built technologies that can place almost the entire accumulated knowledge of civilisation in a device in our pocket. These are extraordinary achievements, yet none of them can answer the oldest human questions for us. Who am I? Who do I love? Who needs me? What am I serving? What deserves the limited number of days I have been given?

Perhaps the crisis of modern meaning did not appear because we suddenly became emptier than every generation before us. Perhaps we simply became more capable of noticing the empty space, and then built thousands of ways to avoid looking into it.

The danger of a vacuum is not simply that it is empty. The danger is that it is available. Whatever we do not fill intentionally will eventually be filled for us. So the question is not whether something will occupy that space, because something always will.

This week, choose one small space — the first five minutes of the morning, one walk, one wait — and leave it fallow. Then notice what grows there

The question is: what are you allowing to live there?

Alin Budiu · #FEARNOT365 · fearnot365.netlify.app