Vibe doodling

As a kid, I spent a lot of time doodling in my notebooks. I imagine myself scribling away in class when I should have been taking notes. This may seem frivolous, but I recently made the connection between these squiggles and the Dutch notion of niksen, which translates to doing nothing.

It’s different from meditation, which is about actively concentrating to observe your mind. It’s also not about distracting oneself with a TV show. Niksen is literally … doing nothing. It can be just sitting on a chair and gazing out the window. The idea is that by letting the mind wander and rest, it opens up space for new focus and fresh perspectives.

Doodling in my notebook turned into creating interactive web visuals once I learned to program. See some online doodles I made here and here.

I loved the slow, meditative process of iteratively refining these. Add a little color here, reduce the width of an outline there, or tune the speed of an object relative to the cursor position. Freely, without a clear goal or outside pressure. Back then, coding intermittently required me to open another browser tab to read through documentation or search for just the right tutorial. This would take me out of flow state. Arguably, not letting my mind rest. The whole point of niksen.

Today, with AI copilots, I can create even more capable web doodles with much less effort like this one I call Rotating Pixels.

“Vibe coding” lets me stay in the code. There is almost no need to switch back and forth between my editor to code and the browser to look up documentation. It feels more like how I felt when I doodled in my paper notebook. The process is lighter, freer, and closer to niksen. I call it “vibe doodling”.

Give your mind a mini-break. Try niksen by vibe doodling. It’s good for you.