What is up everyone? This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and CEO of Morning Brew, and welcome back to Founders Journal,

My Daily Audio Diary made public for the world, where every day I will give you the listener a backstage

pass into Building Morning Brew to help you think better in order to build better and

today's conversation is around why I and I believe many other people find stillness and doing nothing

incredibly scary. Let's hop into it. So today is the last official day that

Morning Brew is open for business between now and January 3rd.

Don't fear we do have newsletters going out.

Our editorial team always does an amazing job around the holidays to write newsletters to have them scheduled so our content

will be going out but we our team will be out of office for the next few weeks and

so as I go through my conversations,

especially today with employees and other people

outside the business, like I just did a CMO series

interview with Janay Brown, who is amazing,

these conversations have the same type of vibe where we have a conversation and then we end our combo with the classic wishing you happy holidays and hope you get to unplug, relax, and rejuvenate.

And while I do think that it is incredibly important

for everyone to have time to reflect and rejuvenate,

as I think about that wish for myself,

it actually makes me a bit uneasy.

And it made me think about this famous Aaron Westgate boredom study, and you may have heard it,

so I'm going to walk you through what this study was, but particularly right now why I'm thinking about it.

So in 2014, Aaron Westgate was a student at the time, and she carried out a test to tackle this big question

around humanity's inability to sit quiet and alone in a room.

...