“The quieter you become, the more you can hear.” – Ram Dass
WELCOME to another Saturday of ‘Digital Zen’.
It’s the third day of Ramadan. If you’re fasting, you know this feeling: the emptiness. Not just in the stomach. In the hours. The long stretch between dawn and dusk where there’s nothing to consume, nothing to fill the space with.
Just… waiting. Being. Existing in the hollow.And if you’re like most of us, you’ve probably already reached for your phone. Scrolled TikTok. Checked Instagram. Filled the emptiness with something, anything.
Because boredom has become intolerable. As if the absence of stimulation is itself a kind of pain.
But here’s what nobody’s telling you: Boredom wasn’t always the enemy. For most of human history, it was the doorway. To reflection. To creativity. To God.
Then the algorithm arrived. And it stole the doorway.
The Dopamine Trap
Every time you open TikTok or Instagram Reels, you’re entering a system engineered to hijack your brain’s reward circuitry. The algorithm doesn’t show you what you want. It shows you what will make you want more.
Researchers call it “dopamine hijacking”. The endless scroll triggers dopamine in the same pathways activated by gambling and drugs. The variable reward schedule keeps you pulling the lever like a rat in a Skinner box.
Former Facebook executive Sean Parker admitted it: “We need to give you a little dopamine hit… That’s a social-validation feedback loop… exactly the kind of thing a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”
The average person now checks their phone 96 times per day – once every ten minutes. We’ve outsourced our tolerance for emptiness to machines designed to ensure we never develop one.
What Ramadan Teaches
There’s a reason fasting is hard. Not just because of hunger. Because of silence.
The deeper practice – the one that separates ritual from transformation – is sawm al-jawārih: fasting of the limbs. Restraining not just the stomach but the eyes, the ears, the tongue. From gossip. From excess. From consumption.
Including digital consumption.
Imam Al-Ghazali wrote that fasting breaks the nafs – the ego-self that constantly demands more, louder, faster. The nafs cannot tolerate emptiness. It fills every void with desire, every silence with noise.
Sound familiar?
The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) spent long stretches in the cave of Hira before revelation came. Because silence creates the conditions for clarity. For receiving rather than consuming.
But you can’t receive if you’re scrolling. You can’t hear what emerges from stillness if you refuse to sit in it.
This is what Ramadan confronts: Can you sit with emptiness?
The algorithm bets you can’t. Ramadan bets you can.
What the Longhouse Elders Knew
Before Instagram, before smartphones, Sarawak’s longhouses had a different relationship with time.
Evenings weren’t “dead time” to kill. They were when stories were told, knowledge passed down, community gathered – not to consume content but to create connection.
I’ve sat in longhouses where elders could sit in silence for an hour without discomfort. Peaceful silence. The kind where presence itself is enough.
They understood: Boredom is not the absence of meaning. It’s the presence of space. And space is where wisdom grows.
Iban and Bidayuh elders practised contemplative awareness – the ability to observe thoughts without being consumed by them, to sit with discomfort without immediately reaching for relief. Mental resilience built through thousands of hours of unhurried presence.
TikTok has killed this in a single generation.
I watch young Sarawakians scrolling through the same algorithmic feed, attention spans collapsing in real time. Cultural transmission that once happened in silence now competes with an infinite scroll engineered to be more compelling than any elder could ever be.
We’re not just losing languages. We’re losing the capacity for sustained attention that made those languages meaningful.
Wu Wei vs. Algorithmic Anxiety
The Dao De Jing teaches wu wei – effortless action flowing from stillness. The empty cup is useful because it can be filled. The silent mind is powerful because it can receive.
But the algorithm teaches constant doing, perpetual consumption, the mind that cannot rest, cannot be empty.
Flow states require long stretches of focused attention. Studies show it takes 23 minutes to return to a task after an interruption. Check your phone every ten minutes? You never enter flow. You never access the deeper states where real thinking happens.
Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Nowhere can man find a quieter retreat than in his own soul.”
Today, your soul has push notifications.
The Practice
I have to actively fight the urge to pick up that phone. Every time. I give myself a monologue just to choose not to look: “You don’t need to check. Nothing urgent is happening. Sit still.”
I’m trying to set an example for my kids. Show them it’s possible to be bored, to not reach for the screen the moment silence arrives. But sometimes I find myself trapped anyway – scrolling before I’ve even realised what I’m doing.
If I struggle with this – someone who writes about it, who knows the mechanisms – then I know you’re struggling too.
So here’s what I’m suggesting:
Reclaim one hour of boredom this week.
Not meditation. Not journaling. Just boredom. Sitting. Being empty. No phone. No book. No music. Just you.
See what happens. See what emerges when you stop filling the void.
Your brain will scream for stimulation. Your hand will reach for your phone instinctively. You’ll feel anxious, restless.
That’s withdrawal. From dopamine. From distraction.
Sit through it. Let the boredom be boring. Let the emptiness be empty.
Because on the other side is something the algorithm can never give you: yourself.
What Waits in the Void
Let the algorithm lose you for one hour. Just one.
See who you meet in that space.
I met mine.
Islamic tradition teaches that every human has a Qarin – a spiritual companion from the jinn whose whispers pull toward distraction, toward the lower self. But the Qarin is also a mirror. It reflects what you feed it. Fill your days with endless scroll, and it whispers louder. Sit in silence, and it has nowhere to hide.
When I finally put the phone down – truly down, for a full hour – I met him. Not the devil version. The other one. The Qarin who becomes quiet when you stop running.
I met my future self. The man I’m becoming if I keep choosing stillness over scroll. The father my children will remember not by the glow of a screen but by the presence I chose to give them.
The man I never thought I was capable of being.
But he was there. Waiting. In the void I’d spent years filling with everything except myself.
The Qarin whispers two things: “You’re wasting time” or “This is where you begin”.
The algorithm bets you’ll never sit still long enough to hear the second whisper.
Ramadan bets you will.
The void isn’t empty. You’ve just been too distracted to notice what’s in it.
And what’s in it?
You. The real you. The one the algorithm can never reach.
Go find him.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune. The writer can be reached at sufiansarawak@gmail.com.
