Psychiatrist and author Dirk De Wachter has turned one of the most frustrating experiences of modern life – waiting – into a philosophy. In his book ‘Wachten. Een levenshouding‘ (‘Waiting. A Way of Life‘), published in December 2025, he argues that waiting is not wasted time or passive resignation, but a way of slowing down, paying attention and reconnecting with other people.
“Waiting without expectation” is at the heart of De Wachter’s argument. It means remaining open to what comes your way without immediately demanding a result, purpose or reward. For the Belgian psychiatrist, waiting can create space for reflection and for things that cannot be forced: thought, beauty, encounter, and connection.
The idea has been with De Wachter for years. Some 15 years ago, his mentor and colleague Sam IJsseling showed him a book by German philosopher Martin Heidegger about waiting. That encounter planted the seed for what would eventually become ‘Wachten. Een levenshouding’, a book that itself took years to come to fruition.
De Wachter’s approach is deliberately grounded in everyday life. Waiting at a bakery, sitting in traffic, standing on a railway platform or finding yourself with unexpected free time can all become opportunities to step outside the relentless pressure to be productive.
“Go along with every temptation less,” he advises. “You don’t need to go on a city trip every weekend. Stay home for a few days. Have a coffee, go for a walk or just daydream.”
From lost time to time gained
For De Wachter, the problem is not simply that modern life is busy. It is that constant activity can leave little room for attention, either to ourselves or to other people.
“By not always talking, chatting and filling every silence, a more connecting discourse can emerge,” he said in an interview with Belgian public broadcaster VRT Radio 1. “By remaining silent and not always filling everything in, the essential aspects of life can come to the surface. Depth is being pushed aside by noise.”
That idea also runs through the book, which mixes philosophical reflections with stories from De Wachter’s own life and his work as a psychiatrist. He draws on thinkers including Heidegger and the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, while also referring to poets such as Vasalis and Charles Bukowski.
Waiting, he stresses, is not the same as simply doing nothing. Nor is it necessarily the same as “waiting for” something specific to happen. Heidegger’s idea of an open, expectation-free form of waiting is closer to what De Wachter has in mind.
That distinction is important. Sometimes action is precisely what is needed. His ideal is more like the watchful waiting of a doctor or psychiatrist: not intervening too early, but also not too late.
There are also forms of waiting that are anything but liberating. People waiting for welfare payments, for example, can be driven into despair when money runs out before the end of the month. Children sheltering from bombs or families waiting for news about relatives during a war experience waiting as trauma.
“The only thing you must not wait for in life is looking the other person in the eyes,” De Wachter says.
A response to an overstimulated society
His plea for slowing down is rooted partly in what he sees in his psychiatric practice. He says he encounters people who are overstimulated, exhausted and suffering from burnout.
Therapy and medication can help, he argues, but slowing down can also have a preventive role. Rather than waiting until people reach a crisis, society could make more room for reflection and rest before problems become overwhelming.
That means resisting the idea that every moment must be filled and every experience must be optimised.
A three-hour delay on a train to Paris, for example, might normally be regarded as three hours lost. De Wachter instead used the unexpected time to read, something for which he has little time in his normal routine. Waiting at the bakery can similarly become an opportunity to talk to a neighbour rather than stare at a smartphone.
The book presents such moments as small openings in a culture increasingly organised around speed, efficiency and instant gratification.
Waiting as a route to connection
Ultimately, De Wachter’s argument is less about time management than about human relationships.
He worries that society is becoming increasingly focused on the individual, what he describes as an “LLC-me”, or a private corporation of the self. In that world, personal achievement, career and self-fulfilment can crowd out the responsibility to others.
“The existence is not an LLC-I,” he says. “As important as a sense of self is a sense of connection. Being together is essential to being human.”
Waiting, in this sense, becomes an invitation to listen. It creates the possibility of noticing another person instead of constantly rushing towards the next objective.
One of the examples associated with the book comes from the coronavirus pandemic, when De Wachter found himself standing in a long queue at a bakery. While almost everyone else was looking at their smartphone, he was reading a book. Then he noticed another person reading: the poet and columnist Bernard Dewulf.
They did not necessarily need to speak. The simple fact that they were both “waiting” in the same way created a moment of recognition. Dewulf later died, and a year afterwards De Wachter met his widow at a lecture. She gave him a book that, she said, Bernard had intended for him.
For De Wachter, the encounter illustrates one of the “three blessings” of waiting: surprising thoughts, beauty and meeting others.
Not every moment needs to be filled
The philosophy also explains why De Wachter is critical of the modern obsession with experiences. A weekend does not necessarily have to involve another flight, city break or carefully planned activity. An empty afternoon is not automatically a problem to be solved.
The challenge is to tolerate the gap.
That gap is symbolised in one of De Wachter’s more playful reflections: the hole in the middle of a decorated doughnut. Consumer culture, he suggests, often tries to fill the existential “hole” with things, experiences and distractions. But the decoration is not the essence.
“As we cannot fill the existential hole of the world, however much we try to fill it through consumerism,” he writes, “it is not about the decoration, but about the essence of that hole.”
The book is therefore less a conventional self-help manual than an invitation to think. A review in Boekenkrant described it as a relatively short book whose ideas can occupy readers long after they have finished it, and which invites rereading.
Patience, illness and mortality
For De Wachter, waiting is not merely an abstract philosophical concept. It has also become personal.
He was diagnosed with cancer in 2021 and underwent intensive treatment, the effects of which continue to affect his energy. Regular medical check-ups have brought their own difficult periods of waiting. At one point, an unfavourable scan raised the possibility of a metastasis. Waiting for the definitive diagnosis was, he says, extremely frustrating. It ultimately turned out to be a lymphatic condition rather than the feared metastasis, but his prognosis remains poor.
His response is not to pretend that waiting is easy.
“I have to accept that,” he said. “And in the meantime I want to live well, and by that I mean: caring and lovingly.”
Work, he says, helps him cope, as does his partner, children and grandchildren. Connection, once again, is central.
From Heidegger to everyday life
Although the book has philosophical roots, De Wachter writes in the same gentle, accessible style for which he is known. He has previously become a bestselling author with books including ‘Borderline Times‘, ‘De kunst van het ongelukkig zijn‘ and ‘Vertroostingen‘.
His recurring message is that suffering, imperfection and vulnerability are not problems that can simply be eliminated. A meaningful life instead involves learning to live with uncertainty and with what cannot be immediately resolved.
That is why waiting without expectation is so important. It does not mean giving up on ambition or refusing to act. It means resisting the pressure to control every outcome.
De Wachter even connects the idea to faith. He sees prayer, at its best, as an opportunity to become quiet, step away from the noise of the world and focus on what is essential. He also draws on Levinas’s idea that the divine can be encountered in the face of the person who needs care.
The connection between waiting and care is therefore fundamental: patiently looking at another person, listening to them and allowing them time.
A commendable plea , but is it realistic?
De Wachter’s plea for a slower life is commendable. But it can also seem somewhat unrealistic, and his swipe at travel is arguably too easy.
The reality is that people increasingly do not want to “do nothing”. They want more things to do, more places to go and more services to be available. Every Sunday should be a shopping Sunday; shops, restaurants and attractions should be open whenever people want them; and increasingly, the expectation is that services should be available around the clock, seven days a week.
There is an obvious contradiction here. People expect a 24/7 society as consumers, yet many are less willing to work outside traditional office hours or at weekends themselves because they do not want to miss out on leisure time.
And this is hardly just a phenomenon among younger generations.
In my own increasingly gentrified surroundings, I see grandparents and parents organising entire weekends away with their families. They head to Center Parcs, the Ardennes, the Belgian Coast or the Champagne region in France. Leisure itself has become something to organise, consume and maximise.
That is a very different family rhythm from the past, when children and grandchildren might gather at their parents’ or grandparents’ home for a Sunday lunch or dinner, rather than spending an entire weekend away together.
This makes De Wachter’s call for collective slowing down difficult to reconcile with the way contemporary leisure has evolved. Even time spent together is increasingly something that has to be planned, booked and filled with activities.
The problem, then, may not simply be that people are travelling too much. It may be that we have become uncomfortable with unstructured time itself.
And that is where De Wachter’s argument becomes both most interesting and most difficult to implement. The challenge is not convincing people that they are too busy. Many probably know that already. The harder question is whether they are actually willing to give up the constant availability of entertainment, shopping, travel and organised experiences.
I simply do not see this collective winding down happening.
Making room for a different kind of life
De Wachter’s philosophy may sound deceptively simple: slow down, tolerate silence, stop trying to fill every moment and pay attention to the people around you.
But in a society built around speed, instant communication and constant stimulation, those simple acts can become surprisingly radical.
Waiting can be frustrating. It can also be unjust or traumatic. But when it is freely chosen, De Wachter believes it can become something else: a space in which thoughts emerge, beauty becomes visible and encounters become possible.
His message is ultimately not to wait for life to begin, but to recognise that life is already happening in the apparently empty moments.
As the poem ‘Eb‘ by Vasalis, which closes the book, puts it: “I withdraw and wait. / This is the time that is not lost.”
For De Wachter, that may be the point. Time spent waiting does not necessarily disappear. Sometimes it is precisely in the waiting that we begin to notice what the rush was preventing us from seeing.
