Tim Ferriss admitted that twenty years of optimizing his life created “a lot of collateral damage.”
He’s not wrong. And he’s not alone. A lot of us have been sprinting in carefully calibrated directions, and somewhere along the way we forgot to ask whether the direction mattered. Tim Ferriss, to his credit, is asking now.
But here’s the thing: two Japanese writers figured this out centuries ago.
One of them lived in the 14th century. The other rode trains to nowhere for fun.
The Monk with Nothing to Do
Around 1330, a Buddhist monk named Yoshida Kenkō（吉田兼好） sat down with a brush and began writing. Not because he had a deadline, or an audience, or a message to deliver. He wrote because he was alone, the hours were long, and the brush was there.
The result was Tsurezuregusa （徒然草）— usually translated as Essays in Idleness.
It’s one of the most beloved works in Japanese literature: 243 short passages on everything and nothing.
The moon. The proper way to arrange flowers. Why people are foolish. Why foolishness is fine. A court lady’s carriage. A gecko on a wall. Death, which arrives without warning and doesn’t care about your plans.
There is no much argument in Tsurezuregusa. No emphasised self-improvement arc. No notable takeaway. Kenkō doesn’t want to make you better.
He just wants to notice things, and write them down, and leave them for whoever happens to read them — or no one.
This is not laziness.
It’s something more radical: a refusal to make experience justify itself.
The Man Who Traveled to Nowhere
Six centuries later, a writer named Uchida Hyakken (内田百閒) boarded a train.
He had no destination. Or rather, his destination was the train. He wanted to ride — specifically, he wanted to ride the brand-new Ahō Ressha（阿房列車） (the Fool’s Express, as he cheerfully named it) — for the simple, inexplicable, entirely sufficient reason that he wanted to.
When asked why, Hyakken gave the only honest answer available: ikitai kara iku.
“I’m going because I want to go.”
He went. He sat in the train. He ate a bento, noted the quality of the tea, watched the landscape pass. He came back. He wrote about it.
The essay that emerged from this non-event is funny, precise, quietly moving, and absolutely impossible to summarize.
Something happened on that train. It just refuses to be extracted into meaning.
If Kenkō were alive to read it, I suspect he would nod.
What “Wabi-Sabi” Gets Wrong
Western readers who come to Japanese aesthetics often arrive via wabi-sabi: the beauty of impermanence, imperfection, the weathered and the incomplete. It’s a real concept. But in translation, it tends to become decoration — a cracked tea bowl, moss on a stone, aestheticized melancholy you can hang on the wall.
What Kenkō and Hyakken actually practice is harder to package than that.
Kenkō writes that we should not wait for the full moon, or the cherry blossoms at their peak. The half-glimpsed, the anticipated, the already-passing — these are more beautiful than the thing itself, fully arrived and already beginning to leave. This is not passive acceptance of loss. It is an active preference for the incomplete.
Hyakken goes further. He doesn’t just accept incompleteness — he courts it. He goes on journeys with no sightseeing, no souvenirs, no encounters worth reporting. He spends an entire essay grieving his cat. He describes being chronically in debt with an equanimity that feels almost philosophical, except it isn’t — it’s just him, being exactly who he is, declining to perform distress.
This is closer to what Kenkō meant, I think, than any tea bowl.
The Essay as a Form of Not-Arriving
Montaigne — the West’s great champion of digression — described his essays as essais, attempts that never quite conclude. He wrote about cannibals and coaches and his own kidney stones with equal curiosity, and ended each piece more uncertain than when he began.
Kenkō would have recognized something in this. So would Hyakken.
But where Montaigne’s essays feel like a mind restlessly interrogating itself, Kenkō and Hyakken feel like minds at rest — not because they’ve found answers, but because they’ve stopped expecting answers to arrive.
The question of why one writes, or notices a particular quality of autumn light, is simply set aside. The noticing is enough.
This is the tradition I want to trace in this space, alongside the Tsurezuregusa pieces I’ve been writing here: a lineage of writers who took aimlessness seriously, and found in it not emptiness, but a peculiar, irreducible fullness.
I am a huge admirer of Tim Ferriss. And the fact he is just now discovering that the self-help treadmill has limits is a telling.
Kenkō stepped off it in 1330. Hyakken never got on.
A Note on Hyakken in English
Uchida Hyakken (1889–1971) remains largely untranslated.
A handful of his dream-prose pieces have found English readers, but the great essays — the Ahō Ressha series, the cat memoir Nora-ya, the quietly devastating wartime sketches — remain inaccessible to most readers without Japanese.
This is a genuine loss. Not because Hyakken is a hidden genius awaiting discovery (though he is), but because his particular combination — deadpan humor, frank melancholy, total indifference to narrative payoff — is so rare in any language.
In the pieces that follow, I’ll be reading Hyakken alongside Kenkō: not as influence and echo, but as resonance.
Two writers, separated by six centuries, who arrived at the same strange, unhurried, remarkably livable place.
The train is leaving. There’s nowhere it needs to go. ■
More detail:
https://www.ndl.go.jp/portrait/e/datas/6240