Daily Inspiration Quote by David Viscott

Life has "empty spaces" not because it lacks events, but because it’s structured around gaps: commutes, insomnia, weekends that don’t live up to their hype, the quiet after a breakup, the limbo between decisions. Viscott, a psychologist who spent a career watching people outrun silence, frames reading as the most "proper" diversion precisely because it doesn’t just anesthetize those gaps - it metabolizes them. The line is a gentle rebuke to the cheaper diversions that blunt feeling without producing anything lasting. Reading, in his formulation, is leisure with an aftertaste of selfhood.

The phrasing does a lot of therapeutic work. "Diversions" admits we’re talking about distraction, not sainthood. Then "proper" slips in a moral standard without preaching. It’s the language of someone who understands human avoidance and tries to redirect it rather than shame it. The pairing "useful and entertaining" is the tell: Viscott is arguing against the false binary between improvement and pleasure. He’s prescribing a medium that can soothe, stimulate, and reorganize a mind at once.

There’s also a cultural context baked in: late-20th-century self-help and talk-media promised shortcuts to insight. Viscott’s line sounds almost old-fashioned by comparison, insisting that the best mental health hack is slow, dialogic, and private. Subtext: you can’t always control what life gives you, but you can choose what voices occupy the quiet.