The Overwhelming Noise

Well, huh... here we are.

This post has been in the queue for two weeks or so now. It's involved a lot of note-taking, thinking, writing, and rewriting—rinse and repeat.

For this post, I wanted to jot down a bunch of random things, take a step back, and then come back later when I had some additional thoughts sorted out in my brain.

And don't fret - I won't get into politics here. There are plenty of better sources for political commentary than this old geek's site. The last political controversy I had online that I can remember in which I was involved in was whether or not it was a good idea to remove the headphone jack from the iPhone.

Politics are not an area I want to explore in any of these posts. So don't fret.

But yikes.

This month, the noise has been deafening, hasn't it?

I'm not only talking about the banter on the television or the complete flood of information that comes at you 24 hours, seven days a week like a nonstop tsunami. I'm referring to the high noise-to-signal ratio that is consuming everyone with a non-relenting echo chamber which gets louder and louder every year.

The number of friends, co-workers, and family who have expressed a feeling of loneliness or depression that have reached out over the last months has made it evident to me it's reached epidemic proportions.

It's blowing out our collective eardrums at a 12 out of 10 on the volume knob.

As a technologist and someone who has built a career out of writing software, it would have been hard for me to imagine the technology we have so readily available today to connect the world in an instant when I was in a tiny college dorm hacking away on a homebuilt computer.

With all these advances, there's an apparent growing sense of ... sadness?

There are days when I want to be more analog, and I miss a time when you learned what was happening on the 6 p.m. evening news or (goodness!) until the paper was delivered the next day.

I have this faint memory of my grandfather explaining how to read the paper to see how the stock market did the day before. I can't recall how old I was, but I remember having to scan through these long pages to try and find the symbol for a company I was familiar with — to see if they had moved a few cents.

Fast-forward to today. I carry a machine with more computing power than the space shuttle in my pocket; I ask my phone, and I can get an answer to anything.

Instantly.

Sadly, a more straightforward, quieter time is something my kids will never know. And I can't even begin to ponder what type of technology-induced information overload their kids will also face. It doesn't seem to be getting any better.

Rebecca Solnit recently wrote a very worthwhile article to read on our dangerously disconnected world:

Aversion to direct contact with others has become so normal in my home town that I've become avoidant myself after too many encounters with people who seem to find it bafflingly transgressive to engage with any casual remark or question from a stranger, and mostly fail to respond. I wander in a city that feels ghostly, depopulated, even when bodies are on the street, and I feel like a ghost myself in the lack of acknowledgment, in others' blank reluctance to utter even those tiny "excuse me" negotiations to get around someone or warn someone.

The pandemic emptied out the streets, but this is another kind of emptiness – it often seems as though fewer people are out and about, but also the people still present are a lot less present.

It's incrementally it's become normal for us all to be in that limbo, that bardo.

As I look back at my online writing and journals over the last few years, this topic hasn't just popped to the top of mind in the last few weeks; it's something I've been thinking about for quite some time now.

• In "ReThinking Reading": 'We all generally fall into a trap of consuming more and more bullshit daily; we are not interested in valid truth, but rather in information that is false, useless, and entertaining. Doomscrolling.'
• In "Firestarters ": 'And maybe that's the most important thing we can remember as we age. Stay curious.'

This is all a long-winded way of just saying that the noise of the reality-distorting echo chamber has become deafening.

If you're still with me (and I hope you are), this isn't intended to be a post about the dystopian state of 2024. As I've often said, writing for me is cheaper than therapy.

What I wanted to get to is that it's about choice.

Stoics talk about a dichotomy of control: the things that are within your control, your thoughts and actions, and the things that are outside of your control. Which is, funny enough, pretty much everything else.

It's about choosing to control what fuels you.

Seth Godin wrote:

When we pick our fuel, we pick our companions for the journey ahead.

Choosing to care about what other people care about surrenders your agency. You'll find that success feels hollow, because it's their success, not yours. And blaming the false metrics for losing your way is not as useful as simply walking away from them in the first place.

It's about having hope.

Maybe it comes from my own fascination with morbid math, but if you do the math:

I guesstimated that I probably have somewhere around 43% of my time left on the planet. Given the average age of a human today is 90, dividing that by my current age (52), I can approximate that I'm 57% done. Yes, it's unlikely that this is an accurate prediction of my actual time left, but it's a good lens that I'm likely past the halfway point to whatever's next.

That clock, since I wrote the post on having an estimated 43% left, is now at 40%.

With that in mind, I've become aware of when things feel tedious or not joyful. They haven't for a few months, so the alarm has gone off that tells me it's essential to take a step back, analyze, and try to reconnect to things that matter.

So, what's the plan?

This time I've decided to go broad; I've taken conscious recognition of the fact that most things are designed to suck the oxygen out of the room. The businesses of social media are businesses of addiction. They are places where their algorithms are designed to continuously feed you nuggets of "all types" of information to keep you engaged.

Social Networks, outside of distributing this, I've stepped away. Facebook and Twitter were deleted years ago; I've removed Instagram and, luckily, have never even installed TikTok. Threads? It's just more of the same from Meta. BlueSky? Sure, I have an account there, but it's now received massive funding from Blockchain Capital. If history proves anything, this isn't great for the platform in the long run.

I cancelled my subscriptions to Washington Post, The New York Times (although keeping their games app for Wordle), The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker.

I kept The Guardian (which I get via their wonderful Headlines morning update in email, which is a quick glance) and The Atlantic, which I enjoy the writing in.

I haven't watched the evening news in almost a week and a half. Every time I want to, I turn on Guy Fieri's Diners, Drive-ins and Dives instead.

I deleted most of the feeds that I read to start over. People often ask me for a list of things I read, but you know, it kind of creates its own echo chamber when the people you socialize with are all consuming the same content. I want a fresh start.

For now, I will look into more local and independent news outlets. I subscribed to two printed (yes, printed) newspapers: The Onion since I enjoy the humor and will continue to support The SouthWester. I recommend you check them out if you've never read them.

There are lots of great pieces online on how to read news that I've found valuable as I reassess consumption. Laura Owen, a journalist, has this beautiful advice: 'I'll read news, not other people's reactions to news.'

Who know'sknows how all this will end up and work, but I will say that not being bombarded with things I haven't curated to spark thinking or local community has been a worthwhile exercise in refining what really matters for me.

For you? I can't tell you that.

Go Experiment. Find the fun. Reconnect by disconnecting.

In 'This Is The Most Important Thing For These Crazy Times', Ryan Holiday writes:

The world seems to be going crazy ... and it's trying to take you with it.

But here's the thing: You can't let it.

Don't let the crazies make you crazy

Remember: we're in this together.

I'll close out this rambling with the remarkable story of Jimmy Glass. Give it a watch.

Amor Fati ✌🏻