NOISE

The things you don't know you have until they're gone

When I began to realize I was happy, something began to collide with my consciousness: noise. I noticed that the lack of noise often correlated with happiness and that I hadn't noticed the noise until its absence. It took a while to see that some of the freedom I had begun to feel was freedom from a dull noise living in the back of my mind. Some of the noise is leftover from my odd upbringing, but some of the noise springs forth from the society we live in. I cannot tell you which is which, as both manifest similarly.

The noise I'm speaking of isn't, with rare exception, aural. The noise I'm talking about is a state of mind. Or, rather, an affliction of mind. I will mention later how the noise is generated by a multitude of feelings and opinions spontaneously generated by stimulation, internal and external.

The natural causes of this noise come from the drive for money, sex, and power, regardless of how much of each I have. The most common external source is the internet. I've cut out daily social media use because of the noise it generates, but I still use it occasionally, and when I do, I feel especially attuned to the noise it generates. For each post and short-form video, I sense hundreds of small ideas come to the back of my mind, a vast array of feelings and opinions quickly manifesting then, just as quickly, subsiding below the next wave of ideas reacting to the next post. This cycle repeats until the ideas live in the back of my mind like TV static existing with an all-encompassing blunt hum. They demand attention which is unable to be given because of their number.

The noise is generated similarly for natural causes. Every thought and urge about power, sex, or money comes with a flurry of reactive ideas, the same opinions and feelings as with social media. When too many hours of my day have been focused on power, sex, or money, those ideas build up to the same TV static crescendo in my mind, clouding my judgment until I rest long enough for them to calm down.

It works like computer RAM. Filling one's mind with half-baked and incomplete processes jambs up the power available for other things leading to a frustrated and sub-prime state of mind. It's impossible to clear out until the mind is reset. I take one of three routes to reset: exercise, meditation, or sleep. Each option is adequate but has different side effects, such as energizing, calming down, or revitalizing. I will choose one over the other depending on which side effects are the most beneficial at any moment.

Noise is not only a distraction but a force that makes fundamental shifts in perception impossible by its ability to clog up our thinking ability. For example, suppose one's mind holds many feelings and emotional responses to dozens of unrelated things, as outlined above. In that case, how natural does it seem to ponder how summertime birds must feel upon seeing the rising sun? How much more challenging would it be to imagine a world where our fundamental assumptions and societal order differ? This is one of the hurdles we face in bettering ourselves and our world.

Forms of noise have been weaponized to hijack people's thinking abilities. It's difficult to influence and convince people directly, but it's easy to confuse and close minds; think of the 2016 Russian cyber campaign in the United States to undermine Americans' confidence in democracy. This phenomenon happens constantly on a small scale in our hyper-connected digital lives. Trolls, spammers, and scammers exert influence by inflicting confusion with noise.

There's little as prevalent and pervasive today as the noise I've described, and limiting the amount of it in our lives is always positive. How much of a negative impact is it having on our lives?