Against the Noise

Why Silence Feels Radical in 2025

We live in a time of relentless noise. Not just the traffic outside or the television murmuring in the background, but the constant hum of digital chatter. Notifications, headlines, messages, the stream of voices that never stops. Even when we’re alone, we carry the noise with us. The screen glows, and some part of us believes that if we stop looking or listening, we’ll miss something crucial.

But what happens when we do stop?

Silence today feels almost transgressive. We have learned to equate it with absence, with wasted time, and with loneliness. Yet silence, when chosen, is none of these things. It’s not the void left when sound disappears, but the space in which something deeper can emerge. In silence, we notice the rhythm of our own breath. We hear the creak of the floorboards, the bird stitching its call into the morning. We feel what we’ve been pushing aside.

I’ve been practicing this in small ways. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been slowly removing most of the apps from my phone, especially ones for social media. It was startling to realize how often my hand reached for my phone automatically and how long I lingered on it, as though silence itself was intolerable. Now, when I catch myself in those restless moments, I try to stay with the quiet instead. Sometimes that means a few deliberate breaths. Sometimes a walk with nothing but the air in my ears.

I’m not there yet. I still lean on music, sometimes Sufjan Stevens, sometimes a quiet piano line, as a bridge into stillness. Earlier this week, I wrote about “Songs for Stillness,” the way music can hold space until we’re ready to face silence directly. For me, it’s a practice: learning to be at ease with nothing but my own breath, my own thoughts.

Silence is not only practical; it’s spiritual. Many traditions have understood it as a doorway. Christian mystics called it the ground where the divine could finally be heard. The desert fathers sought it not as escape, but as encounter. Even outside religion, silence steadies the heart and clears the mind. It lets us hear what our hurried lives drown out, the small intuitions, the tender longings, the whispers of conscience and compassion.

Philosophers have a reach history with silence as well. Silence is often mistaken for emptiness, a void where sound and speech have been stripped away. But for the Stoics, silence was never absence; it was presence, a discipline of attention that opened the way to peace and growth. And after all his careful reasoning, the philosopher Wittgenstein concluded: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. That is not defeat, but recognition that silence holds truths words cannot bear. To practice silence is to step into that space, where language ends and something else begins.

In an unquiet world, silence becomes medicine. It softens anxiety. It sharpens attention. It makes space for presence, for prayer, for reflection. It calls us back to ourselves. Silence does not erase the noise of the world, but it teaches us how to move through it without being consumed. This is not easy. Our culture rewards speed, wit, and visibility. To pause feels like falling behind. Paradoxically, silence is what makes our words matter when they arrive. A writer like Virginia Woolf could linger over the shimmer of a single moment because she was practiced in attention. A songwriter like Sufjan Stevens can draw us into quiet grief or fragile joy because he leaves room around his notes.

The stillness is not empty, it’s alive.

So, I’m practicing. Removing the noise where I can. Learning to sit with silence even when it presses in as discomfort. It doesn’t come naturally, but I’m beginning to believe that in a noisy world, silence itself is an act of defiance. And perhaps also, an act of care.

This week, I invite you to join me. Try deleting one app from your phone that tempts you into constant distraction. Or set aside five minutes each day for silence, not to be productive, not to solve or achieve anything, but simply to sit in stillness and see what rises. Soul, heart, and mind each have their own ways of responding. You may be surprised by what you begin to hear.

May you hear beneath the noise.

Love,

Adam

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