A walk with no earbuds is a meeting with your own ideas. Most people keep canceling it.

Thinking needs unoccupied time, and unoccupied time has become genuinely rare, not through any failing of yours but because something is always available to fill it. Ideas surface in gaps: in walks, in showers, in the space between two tasks. Fill every gap and the thinking still happens, only slower and usually at night. The input was never the problem; the missing pauses are.

Take one walk this week with nothing playing. The first ten minutes will be dull. What arrives after that is the part worth having.