Lately, I’ve noticed a shift happening that isn’t showing up in productivity reports or health trend roundups. It’s quieter than that. More personal.
People begin to see peace not as something they can achieve when their lives slow down, but as something they actively choose in everything they do now.
Not as peaceful as giving up. Not as peaceful as when I checked out. But peace is a deliberate refusal to be swept away by the urgency that fills every moment of modern life.
A few years after moving to Saigon, I noticed this shift in myself. The city is a beautiful chaos: motorcycles ply intersections with no apparent logic, street food stalls appear at 6 a.m., plans dissolve and reform without warning. You either fight it or you come to understand that this control is an illusion that you maintain at great personal cost.
This class took longer than I care to admit. But it’s the same lesson I see more people learn now, even in the comfort of quiet life: Urgency is mostly the story we inherit, and peace is what happens when we stop telling it.
What exactly is “modern urgency”?
Before we say no to something, it helps to name it clearly.
Modern urgency is not the same as true busyness. Real busyness is real: deadlines, responsibilities, people who need your help. That exists. What I mean by urgency is different. It’s an ambient feeling that you should always be doing more, moving faster, optimizing harder, and any moment of stillness is a wasted moment.
It manifests as the urge to check your phone before your feet touch the floor. The guilty pleasure of sitting around drinking coffee and not listening to a podcast. Low-level panic after a slow afternoon. The feeling that rest must be earned, that peace is a reward, not a right.
Most of the time this sense of urgency does not come from your actual situation. It comes from the architecture of modern attention: apps designed to reward sustained engagement, work cultures that conflate availability with dedication, and a self-improvement industry built on the premise that you’re never enough.
In this case, peace is not passive. Choosing it is an act of mild rebellion.
Buddhist frameworks that really help
There is a concept in Buddhism that reflects this very well: papanka. It roughly translates as mental proliferation, which is the brain’s tendency to transform a moment into a complex story about the past, the future, what it means, what you should do, what could go wrong.
The urgency most of us feel every day is papañca in overdrive. The present moment is great. It’s these layers of stories that create tension.
Buddhist practice does not require you to eliminate your thoughts. It requires that you pay attention as you do it and gently come back to what is actually going on here. Paying attention over and over again is practice. This turns out to be profoundly disruptive in a culture that profits from your distraction.
The Eightfold Path, which I have written about before, provides a framework for ethical and mindful living that is more practical than religious. Right mindfulness, right effort, right mindfulness. These are not commandments. They prompt me to ask: Am I reacting automatically, or am I actually choosing this?
Why are more and more people coming here now?
I don’t think this is a trend in the lifestyle magazine sense. I think it’s a reaction to a certain kind of exhaustion.
Limited collective confrontations have occurred over the past few years. Productivity, busyness, and the limits of the idea that optimizing your schedule can address deeper restlessness. Those who strive for every efficiency but still feel empty begin to question the premise, not just the execution.
At the same time, there is plenty of evidence that stillness works. A large multi-site study published in Nature Human Behavior Research has found that even a single, self-administered mindfulness practice can significantly reduce stress in a variety of people. Not the level of commitment for a meditation retreat. Just a brief, deliberate pause.
This is important because the barriers to entry are low. You don’t need a cushion, a teacher, or a specific belief system. You just have to stop, for a moment, and really mean it.
What does this rejection actually look like?
Here I would like to object to this idea being softened into a decorative version.
Choosing calm isn’t like scented candles and slow mornings (although those aren’t issues). In most of life, it looks like friction. When everything inside you wants to clear notifications, it may seem like messages aren’t being responded to right away. This can look like sitting on an unfinished to-do list instead of completing it while exhausted. It looks like the conversation ends without the last word being spoken.
I run in the Saigon heat most mornings, partly for fitness and partly because voluntarily choosing to be uncomfortable can rewire your relationship with discomfort. You stop running away from it. You realize you can be with it without it defining the moment.
This is what it feels like to consciously reject the sense of urgency from within. It’s not that there is no pressure, but the relationship with pressure is different.
Rebuttal: Isn’t this a privilege?
It’s worth accepting resistance here because there’s nothing wrong with it.
For some, the sense of urgency is not story, but reality. Financial pressures, caring responsibilities, job insecurity, health crises. The idea of ”choosing peace” may sound tone-deaf when you are sincerely fighting to keep things going.
I spent my twenties working in a warehouse and feeling lost and empty, not because I was in an existential crisis, but because I was in a crisis of meaning. I know the difference matters. I know not everyone has access to the same still conditions.
But here’s my thought: the practices that make peace possible, even at their most useful, are very small. The Vietnamese cafe culture I fell in love with in Saigon didn’t require money or leisure time. It just requires getting into the habit of not rushing to drink coffee. Being in a place, not passing through it.
This habit occurs more often than we think. Not all of it, but more.
A framework for integrating rejection into everyday life
What I want to offer is not a series of tips, but something closer to a sequence, a series of small choices that compound over time.
The first step is to pay attention. Not changing anything yet, just starting to see how often you’re in reactive mode: rushing between tasks before one is complete, scrolling while waiting for anything, filling silence because the silence feels like a problem that needs to be solved. Just noticed.
The second action is to insert friction. Deliberately slow down one thing every day. No need to look at your phone while drinking your morning coffee. Walk without headphones. These are not great moves. They’re just little proof that you can survive without stimulation and nothing bad will happen.
The third step is to create an “anchor of peace.” A fixed point in the day that belongs to existence. Sit for five minutes. walk. Drink slowly. It doesn’t need to be long. What matters is that it’s consistent and that’s what you actually think when it happens.
Step four is the hardest: learning to live with incompleteness. If you go back in time, the most pressing thing is a low-level intolerance of unresolved matters. Unread emails, unanswered questions, unfinished projects. Peace does not require doing everything. It requires accepting the bad things.
What does this change (and what doesn’t change)
Let me be honest about the limitations here.
Choosing peace as a practice does not solve structural problems. It won’t make your job less demanding or shorten your inbox. It fails to address the real stresses of complex lives. What it changes is the internal weather under these conditions.
In my own experience, the biggest transformation is not in the environment. This is because of the energy I no longer spend fighting. For me, anxiety is mostly about my brain constantly simulating things that haven’t happened yet. The practice of Buddhism, slowly and imperfectly, taught me to return to what was before me. Not intended as a treatment. as a habit. You practice things, like skills, because the alternative is exhausting.
I think that’s the broader picture. People don’t opt out of their lives. They choose to shed the artificial urgency that overrides life and masquerades as life itself.
More practice time per week
Once a week, set aside twenty minutes, 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 most rushed this week? What was I really afraid of in that moment (missing out, falling behind, being judged, or something else)? What would it cost me to really slow down?
Most people find that the cost of their worries is significantly less than the cost they pay in stress and distraction. Seeing this on paper over and over again gradually changes your reaction. You begin to realize the urgency of something before it overwhelms you.
2 minutes practice
Choose a moment today when you would normally be in a hurry or filling up space on your phone. The minutes between tasks, the wait in line, the gap after lunch.
When that moment comes, don’t fill it. Just breathe. Pay attention to what’s around you. Pay attention to how your body feels now, not the next thing, just now. If an idea comes with an agenda, acknowledge it and return.
Two minutes. You achieve nothing. That’s the point. You are practicing being here and not elsewhere, and this practice, continued, is true peace.
Common pitfalls
- Consider peace your reward. Tell yourself that once the project is done, once the kids are older, once things are less hectic, you’ll slow down. The hustle never ends. Practices that only treat peace as a reward will mostly not be implemented.
- Confusing peace with negativity. Choosing not to be urgent does not mean choosing not to care or to take action. You can work hard and express yourself to the best of your ability and still feel light inside. The two are not opposed.
- Turn practice into another kind of optimization. Download the app to track your meditation streaks and turn stillness into performance metrics. If your mindfulness practice makes you anxious about whether you’re doing it right, something is wrong.
- Expect permanent status. Peace is not something you earn and maintain. This is something you return to multiple times a day after being pulled away. Returning is practice.
- Thinking about it requires quiet or ideal conditions. Saigon is one of the noisiest cities I have ever lived in. Peace is something you build in the hustle and bustle, not run away from it.
A simple takeaway
- Modern urgency is largely a constructed feeling rather than an accurate interpretation of your actual situation. You can question it.
- Choosing peace is a practice, not a personality trait. It is built through small, repeated refusals to let urgency take over.
- Buddhism has a good name for this mechanism: most suffering comes from the mental diffusion beyond the present moment, rather than from the present moment itself.
- You don’t need silence to practice calmness. You need to make a habit of coming back to the present, even briefly, even in the midst of chaos.
- The goal is not to feel calm all the time. It’s about stopping spending huge amounts of energy fighting in the moment you’re in.
- Start small. There’s a moment in the day where you just can’t fill that space. That’s enough to get started.
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