Shallow Thoughts: Silence
If your daily routine is anything like mine it starts out with your cell phone. You wake up, look down and read up on what’s happened during your sleeping hours. How has the world changed, who has tried to contact you? Maybe you are able to squeeze in a few work e-mails over breakfast. On the way to work you bring along a book, or a podcast, maybe even a movie on your tablet. After a day of reading, e-mailing, and talking, you head home. The day is bookended with media on the train (any kind will do) and the newest TV programs at home (there’s too much to keep up with). Then it’s bed time. I’ve been in this rhythm for so long now, and as I look around on the train, it seems clear to me that it’s not an uncommon one. Most of us seem to always be plugged in to some sort of “noise” at nearly every moment. When I say noise I’m not just referring to sound, but rather any sort of external stimulus.
“Savage Lovecast” is one of the many podcasts I listen to as I commute.
I was thinking more on this the other day as I was doing my laundry when my cell phone died mid-podcast. I’m slightly embarrassed to say I felt a moment of panic, what was I going to do now? I had an hour ahead of me, and no noise to stuff into my restless mind. The feeling of this stimulus turning off, and my mind being forced to engage with itself, rather than an external force felt like a shock, like a blast of frigid air as you step outside on a cold day. But within a few minutes I’d slowly started to reacclimatize. I started to think about what I might like to write on next, and reflected on my day. Hearing the sound of my own voice in my head instead of the sound of someone else’s became more and more comforting as time went by. This made me wonder, why don’t I do this more often? The answer is pretty simple. My smartphone.
The advent of the smart phone has done more than any other single device possibly could to fill our minds with chatter and discourage our minds from wandering. On our phone we have the ability to listen to a podcast, read the news, check a sports score, send an e-mail and read a movie review. The list of things you could potentially do is endless, and because of that, most of us find ourselves retreating to smart-phone land any moment the room becomes silent or we don’t know what to do, rather than spending some time inside our own heads. I think this is problematic, because there are really only so many meaningful things you can do on a smartphone in a day. We find ourselves in loops, a rut where we constantly check the same websites and follow the same digital routines. This process of repetition actively discourages originality. While we have the ability to create and have original thoughts when we embrace the silence of our own minds, it is much harder to form truly original or meaningful insights through the chatter and noise that our smart phones distract us with.
Most of us have grown so accustomed to having stimulation thrown at us continuously that we can nearly forget what it’s like to truly be alone with our thoughts. It’s easy to spend a night attached to your cellphone, but I think there’s a lot more to be learned from a night spent alone with your own mind.
