SILENCE!

In yesterday's blog post, I alluded to the concept of silence and how that was an important concept I was going to look at this year. The post got a bit long so I committed to posting again this week. 

I should have stayed silent. 

Social media algorithms are a strange thing. You know they're predicting something about you, but sometimes it's hard to see what the root of that prediction is. I've been getting a lot of self-help philosophy-type videos sent to me on YouTube lately. I don't know if it's just the larger societal New Year resolution phase or if it's cluing in that I'm working on myself a bit. But boy oh boy does YouTube know I'm 40 and going through it.

The advice isn't simply mental self-help. There's a lot coming at me about how to be more creative or how to enhance my creativity. And that's where the concept of silence has entered the chat.

And it's not entirely new in this ongoing conversation. The Navigator and I have talked about meditation in recent blogs. 

So here's the gist. Our world is too loud. And not just in terms of sound volume. More in terms of noise. Gone are the days of doing a single task in silence. We fill the background with music or podcasts, spend our downtime scrolling through endless reels and generally feel compelled to fill every waking moment creating or consuming. 

Sometimes I need to watch my dogs or cat to remind me that always being busy isn't the natural way of things. They can look out the window for hours, take a nap when they're tired. Nature doesn't want us to work an 8-hour day then spend 6 on a side hustle and everything else keeping it together. It's too much. It's overloading our brains. 

In a recent discussion with a coworker, we talked about how you can waste a morning scrolling videos and not feel at all rested. The brain processed hundreds, maybe thousands of ideas in that time. We surmise that this is probably at the core of why we're all always so tired and burnt out. I even offered that the looming TikTok ban could actually do society a lot of good. If only in the short term. 

And it's not just the effect it's having on our brain. I think we're missing out on some things too. Harrison Ford recently released a video called "Listening to the Quiet" where he argues we need to listen to nature and to the natural world to begin understanding what we lost. He talks about hearing ants and caterpillars. My first reaction was, "You can't hear a caterpillar." Until I realized - yes you can and I have. Just not recently. Because I haven't stopped to listen. 

From a creative point of view the argument is generally, that as a consumer of content, you've probably consumed all you'll ever need to be creative. And if you need something else, you'll find it when you need it. But it's time to shut off consuming content and start creating. 

For me, this looks like writing songs or writing text. Or finally getting a start on that Doomsday Device. For others, it might mean finally redecorating, cleaning the car or planting a garden. It's not a strictly artistic exercise - it's about building and creating. 

And it doesn't need to be like sitting in a dark room with no sound or input. It just means cutting back on how much we consume. So, don't bring your iPod on the walk with the dog, don't put on a podcast while folding laundry. Shut the phone off and sit at the table for supper. Engage in a conversation. 

I'm just at the start of this journey of silence. I'm doing well in finding places to quiet things down and doing very well at recognizing when I'm on social media when I could be doing other things or when I have far too many stimuli happening around me and I need to shut some stuff down. 

I can't say that I've felt the effects yet, I'm still tired and extremely grumpy. But I'm going to give this a few weeks. And hopefully, the act of slowing things down and focusing a bit more will start to lift the fog of modern life a bit so I can start thriving in 2025. 

How about that? This whole blog set was really about New Year's resolutions!