For most of my 20s, I couldn’t brush my teeth, ride public transit, or take a walk without listening to a podcast or audiobook. Silence, I thought, was a waste of time.

But since reading All the Beauty in the World (2023), I’ve been reconsidering my relationship to dull, seemingly empty moments. In the book, Patrick Bringley recounts his decade among the watchful guards of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Standing in the Met’s echoic halls for hours on end, day after predictable day, he found that, over time, his relationship to the work slowly changed. Initial enchantment with the art gave way to boredom – and then, enlightenment. He surrendered to the ‘turtleish movement of a watchman’s time’, stopped thinking about how much of his shift was left, and let the hours drift.

I think about Bringley’s experience when I have to engage in any long, monotonous task. It might be waiting in line or on hold, vacuuming, folding laundry, or chopping vegetables for dinner. I resist the urge to fill the time with music or podcasts and strive instead for what Bringley calls a ‘princely detachment’ from time, finding the luxury and nuance in the moment.

Bringley noticed patterns in the different kinds of Met visitors. Hanging up my laundry, I notice patterns in how different articles of clothing tend to wrinkle in the wash. Bringley developed an appreciation for artworks that he initially ignored. I pay finer attention to the unique composition of facial features on the faces of people I stand in line with. I am learning, I think, to appreciate the little things.

Of course, it requires constant practice to find the peace and richness in these stretches of time. But your reward comes, Bringley says, when an hour no longer feels an hour long, and you ‘hardly remember how to be bored’.

It’s fun stumbling upon psychological concepts in unexpected places. I remember first learning about the Johari Window (an obscure framework for thinking about the limits of self-knowledge) in the Robert Galbraith novel The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013). It happened again the other day. I was enjoying the action thriller Nobody’s Hero (2024) by M W Craven – my middle-aged version of brain rot – when the hero Ben Koenig invoked the ‘Peter Principle’ – the idea that people tend to get promoted to the point of maximum incompetence.

Koenig is already a curious character for anyone interested in psychology. He has Urbach-Wiethe disease, which has calcified his right amygdala – apparently rendering him incapable of feeling fear (a handy attribute for an action hero). By dint of his training with various special forces, he’s also a repository of fun psychological wisdom, such as the Peter Principle, which he draws on to explain why the assassins have chosen to murder a bunch of mid-ranking infrastructure experts, rather than their superiors.

I checked it out, and the Peter Principle is a genuine concept that originated with a bestselling, semi-satirical book of the same name in 1969, co-written by two Canadians, the educationalist Laurence J Peter and the playwright Raymond Hull. There’s a simple logic to their idea – you keep performing well, you keep getting promoted, until you reach a managerial role at which you struggle and so you don’t get promoted again. Various studies have confirmed there’s a truth to the logic, at least in the context of sales, the military and academia.

I’m going to add the Peter Principle to my mental dictionary of psychological concepts – and use it as a reminder not to rest on my laurels. We can’t assume that the skills and knowledge that served us well in the past will be enough for whatever challenges we face in the future.