Anesthetising Noise

Rimes McElveen

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from living in a world that never stops talking, dinging, singing, crashing, clanging, and clamoring ceaselessly for our attention.

Most of us carry the layered fatigue around without even noticing anymore. Our phones vibrate in our pockets with notifications, texts, alerts, headlines, breaking news, reminders, reels, podcasts, DMs, updates, and recommendations. Algorithms compete endlessly for our attention while institutions, employers, schools, peers, influencers, and advertisers all continue ANSWERING variations of the same question: What should you buy, be, believe, or do next?

Young adults, especially, are navigating a relentless flood of directions and expectations. Sometimes, the advice and information are conveyed through leading questions as much as actual advice or information. What are you majoring in? What internship are you pursuing? Who are you dating or marrying? Who are you voting for? Who do you want to be? How are you building your résumé? How are you positioning yourself for the future? How are you going to afford anything?

Underneath all of it sits a quieter and more difficult question that far fewer people seem equipped to answer:

How are you discerning a life worth living? Who are you called to become?

Not simply a successful life. Not simply a productive life. Not simply a marketable life. But a faithful one. The good life. Also known as the virtuous life of integrity and meaning.

One of the things that has become increasingly clear to me is that modern life offers virtually no built-in space for reflection anymore. We are surrounded by content, information, commentary, and stimulation, but very little invitation to actually examine and reflect on the value and significance of all of that content and information, much less the support or imperative to reflect on what Mary Oliver calls, “Our one wild precious life.” Even fewer opportunities exist to do so prayerfully, under the careful guidance of the Holy Spirit and a nurturing Christian community.

Christian spirituality has always assumed reflection.

Jesus repeatedly withdrew from the crowds. Before major decisions. After public ministry. In moments of grief. In moments of exhaustion. Again and again throughout the Gospels, Jesus steps away from noise and urgency to pray, reflect, listen, and commune with the Father.

That rhythm was not accidental. Reflection has always been part of healthy human formation.

The Christian tradition developed practices around this reality long before smartphones and social media complicated, even confounded, the discovery and discernment of our authentic selves. Practices like silence, examen, contemplative prayer, Sabbath, lectio divina, retreat, and journaling were never merely spiritual accessories for especially religious people. They were ways of paying attention. Ways of learning to listen attentively to God’s benevolent speech beneath and between the noise of the world. An essential means of aligning one’s life with God.

The world is noisy. Not just technologically noisy, though it is certainly that. The world is spiritually and emotionally noisy too.

The loudest voices in our lives are often not the truest voices. Anxiety is loud. Fear is loud. Comparison is loud. Performance is loud. Consumer culture is loud. Outrage is loud. Ambition is loud. Shame is loud. The endless demand to curate ourselves into more successful, desirable, informed, productive, and optimized versions of ourselves is loud.

But the Spirit rarely shouts, or insists on its own way.

The older I get, the more convinced I become that one of the great spiritual crises of our time is not immorality or disbelief. It is the inability to listen carefully and discern wisely. We are losing the capacity to sit still long enough to notice the goodness, truth, and beauty of our own lives. Not the externals of having a cherished family member or friend, a beautiful city or farm to observe, or a lovely church or school to attend. Appreciating those things is expected in order to be perceived as an appropriately grateful person. The particular deficit I’m touching one is the simple capacity to listen attentively to the integrity and authority of our own, inner, sacred, God-given self.

When we stop listening to our lives, we lose touch with deeper realities. We forget what we actually love. We forget what brings lasting joy. We forget who we are becoming and sometimes who we have already become. We also forget the myriad means by which God has already spoken to us through our own life already. That memory loss renders us nearly deaf to the voice within, the Logos, that is trying to remind us who and whose we really are.

Instead, we become reactive.

We move from notification to notification. Crisis to crisis. Opinion to opinion. We absorb other people’s desires before we ever discern our own. We inherit other people’s fears before we ever name our own. We mistake constant input for wisdom. We lose our capacity to sift and winnow all that is coming at us and hold onto what is true.

Information and knowledge are not the same thing as wisdom, any more than decisions are discernment.

One of the lines that has stayed with me recently is the idea that “the world is just a noisy gong and rarely does love cut through.” That feels painfully accurate some days. We are flooded with voices competing for our attention, but precious few spaces, places, or processes are actually helping us become attentive people.

And yet attentiveness sits near the center of Christian spirituality.

To follow Jesus requires learning to notice. To notice God. To notice our neighbor. To notice our own souls. To notice what is actually shaping us. To notice what is deforming us. To notice where grace is already present and whether we are resting in it or resisting it.

That kind of reflection does not happen accidentally anymore. It requires great intentionality. It requires practice. It requires protecting space from a world designed to fragment and consume every ounce of our attention before we ever have the chance to hear the still, small voice beneath it all.

What if there was a means by which we could protect time to reflect and space to capture our own reflections whenever it was convenient within our own busy schedules? There just might be…