In Search of Quiet

Every day, we’re bombarded with information.  It’s not simply ‘buy me buy me buy me’ that comes from marketers, but it’s information.  News.  According to a Pew Study, we’re getting a LOT of our news from online sources, including social media outlets like Facebook.  We’re getting this information from friends and family, concerned citizens, sponsored posts, and through every screen available. Each nugget of information piles up in the back of our brain like so many newspapers bundled for the recycling center, until the pace of the world becomes too much.

When I open my Facebook, all of the voices are there, screaming at me. No, they don’t mean to scream. They don’t want to scream, but the information that they’re shilling is reminiscent of a bazaar where every factoid or opinion piece is much like a silk scarf or that small whirligig that the huckster wants you to have.  The longer I stay, the louder the voices become, ‘Trump is doing this!” “Hillary is doing this!” “Our environment is in shambles!” The litany goes on and on.

Even the pundits at Saturday Night Live are weighing in on the need for levity.  They had Emily Blunt singing ‘Get Happy’ at the monologue, handing puppies and cookies out to the audience. That same audience had expressions of stunned amazement plastered across their faces while they held said cookies and puppies.  While the monologue was going on, most of the people had that same smile reserved for grandma’s thirty-fifth sweater Christmas present.  Just stay quiet, we’ll deal with this later.

But what’s important? Do we indeed need to know the news every single day? Do we need to know that our possible future President easily falls prey to unabashedly liberal comedy shows like Saturday Night Live? Or that another potential future President didn’t want her emails to become public knowledge? The screams continue, and Ken Bone, the one who was looked to for a bit of solace, isn’t as pure as his image would have you believe.

The craved simplicity becomes buried under the screaming, and it’s no wonder that people will turn to game shows, random television shows, sports, and reality shows for their entertainment.  It’s no wonder that the video game industry is a $630 billion dollar industry.  It’s no wonder, either, that there’s more alcohol production this year when compared to last.  Frankly, it’s not easy to look at this type of escapism as a way to slow it down.

We’re back to the question: what’s important?  Do children need to know up to the minute happenings, or can they be left without the cicada-like constant hum of information and news? Can we go back to the slower world where our news was gleaned from the finite newspaper, a place with only a limited amount of space? Can we go back to using the Internet as a library, rather than a nipple? 

What people seem to forget is that there is a third option when it comes to differentiating between signal and noise.  That’s silence.  Seriously, the monks were onto something, there.