You Need Silence.

The world makes too much noise.

It never makes enough sense.

Everyone wants your attention. Everyone's got something to say, even if they don't know what. Our technology encourages everyone to speak and act before they've taken any time to think. In this loud world, full of outrage and pain, often tinseled in insta-joy, there's something to be said for not saying a single word.

Just sit.

In his 2020 book Silence in The Age of Noise, Erling Kagge describes silence as "the new luxury." Studies have shown that silence can trigger neurogenesis, the growth of new neurons in the brain. It can lower your blood pressure and promote healing. And yet, it's the one thing you're discouraged from doing. Nobody in your life, except maybe one or two people, will ever leave you alone long enough to do it.

Good luck finding silence if you live in a city. There's neighbors and their music and their dogs. There's cars. There's stereos. Even in the suburbs, there's lawnmowers and leaf blowers. There's the constant tug of your phone.

The world gets louder by the hour.

Some of us feel compelled to speak out against the daily assault on compassion, intelligence, and common sense.

It's exhausting.

It often feels like we're sliding backward, forced to watch every leader and public official torch every last wick of decency for power. The worst part? They're so happy about it. They do it with an unbearable dose of delirious glee. Trying to speak through the deafening howls of toxic positivity takes immense energy.

It can leave you sapped.

It gets harder and harder to sculpt the rage and despair into something articulate or legible. Even when you do, there's a thousand trolls waiting to twist it into something else, to ascribe thoughts and motives to you, to project their own anxieties and shortcomings onto your words. They think the only way they can be heard is to silence someone else.

Some days, you just want to let it go.

And you can.

Not forever, but for a little while.

Maybe you don't need to worry about whether the world hears you right now. Maybe your rage and despair can just breathe inside you, formless. Or maybe it's off somewhere else for now, and you just feel the hollow it carved out of you.

Honestly, you'll take it.

When you feel like that, you can just stay quiet. You can turn the volume down on the world. No, it's not going to fix things. It's not going to make everything okay. Sometimes, it's just the only way you can steady yourself again.

In a 2020 article in Frontiers in Psychology, Eric Pfeiffer reviews a range of studies on the harm of noise. It hurts patient recovery and infant development in hospitals. It's associated with higher levels of mental illness, compared to those who live in rural areas. Studies have found that people don't enjoy spending unstructured time by themselves, but when they do "solitude helped subjects calm down, become quiet, and to regulate their affective states." These kinds of activities include daydreaming, meditating, and empty time where they just sat and allowed their minds to roam. I suspect any kind of deep work, including creative work, can get you to that place.

Silence improves your cognition. It helps you think more clearly. It helps you make better decisions. It makes you less impulsive. It helps you regulate your emotions. Time and again, psychologists have found that even just 10 or 15 minutes of quiet time brings all of these benefits.

Here's a little irony:

Everyone keeps talking about the mental health crisis. They've got a hundred answers, except silence. If you stop posting on social media, if you skip the bar and go home to read or draw or just listen to music without lyrics, everyone suddenly wants to know if you're okay.

They think it's weird.

Western consumer culture stigmatizes time alone. The worse our mental health crisis gets, the more they tell you to go out and socialize. They want us out there mingling, expending our last few drops of energy on formalities and small talk, not because it makes us feel better, but because it drives the economy.

Silence isn't just the absence of sound.

You can hear it.

A 2023 study in PNAS discovered that the human brain treats silence as a distinct sound. It triggers thought. Your mind responds to silence, and so does your body.

Communication studies has also noted that silence conveys meaning. It's not the absence of meaning. For thousands of years, humans have used silence to convey ideas and emotions. What someone doesn't say matters, and if they say nothing, they're still telling you something.

You just have to notice.

I've been thinking a lot about silence recently.

These days, a lot of people feel less inclined than ever to spend a quiet night at home thinking about things. They need as much of humanity as possible to endorse their beliefs, because it makes them feel better. They have oceans of anxiety about the future to displace. So they go out into the loud world, seeking validation for everything they want to be true. And if they hear something they don't like, they just have to drown it with their own noise. Meanwhile, the world deals out so much pain and destruction, it demands words.

Silence doesn't lie.

Silence forces us to confront all the things we've been avoiding or trying to exile from ourselves. It's the best medicine. Maybe that's why it's so frightening, and why so many of our friends and families don't want it.

Sometimes, silence is complicity, but not always.

Sometimes, it's protest.

Silence has a way of making people wonder what you're thinking. That can be a good thing. Maybe they need to stop and think a minute. Maybe they need to feel confused and uncomfortable.

Silence can do all of these things.

There's silence that nobody pays attention to, and there's silence that gets their attention. Sometimes you don't have to say anything, or you don't have to say nearly as much as you think.

There's moments when it feels like everything has already been said, and there's nothing left to do, and there's nowhere for the words to go. Or maybe you feel like you've said enough, and you have nothing left to add. So just leave it for now.

We deserve some silence.

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