9.
Sometimes it makes sense to make life more difficult than necessary. To not just skip lightly over the lowest part of the fence. This is why I tried explaining to my children that I wanted to write about silence because it’s more difficult to value silence than noise, and because it is important.
Silence is not first and foremost important because it is somehow better than noise, even if noise is often associated with negative events such as commotion, aggression and violence. Noise comes in the form of distracting sounds and images, and as one’s own fleeting thoughts. We lose a bit of ourselves along the way. I am not only thinking of how exhausting it can be to process so many impressions. This is, of course, true, but there’s more to it than that. Noise in the form of anticipating a screen or keyboard is addictive, and that is why we need silence.
The more we are inundated, the more we wish to be distracted. It should be the other way around, but often it isn’t. You get into a dopamine loop. Dopamine is a chemical substance that transmits signals from one brain cell to another. In short, dopamine does what you desire, seek and crave. We don’t know if we have received an email, message or other form of communication so we check and recheck our phones like a one-armed bandit in an attempt to achieve satisfaction. Dopamine is not programmed to release a feeling of fulfilment even if you’ve achieved what you sought and craved: so you are never satisfied. This means I continue to Google, twenty minutes after I’ve found what I was initially searching for.
This is a banal predicament to find myself in. Still, I often find it easier to continue than to actually stop. I check websites that I just visited, even though I already know their content. And I relinquish a measure of control over my life in the process.
Biology has a natural explanation for my lack of common sense: we are not born to be satisfied. A different chemical in the brain, opioid, is supposed to create that feeling of happiness once you’ve achieved your goals. Unfortunately, dopamine is stronger than opioid, so even if you’ve attained all you ever dreamed of you will continue to do the same thing. Hence the dopamine loop. It is more fulfilling to anticipate and seek, to wander in circles, than simply to value and appreciate the fact that you have fulfilled your desires.
This is a form of noise that engenders anxiety and negative feelings. Most apps have one thing in common: no one uses them. Even successful apps like Twitter have eventually faced resistance. The founders are devastated that their own business idea is showing cracks and growth has slowed down. This is actually a good thing. The problem with achieving success with an app is that the service not only creates addiction—it fosters isolation as well. The basic business model of Twitter and other such social networks is to create a need for you to use the app, which the same app should then fill, but only temporarily. The owners live off your addiction. “Gradually, these bonds cement into a habit as users turn to your product when experiencing certain internal triggers,” Nir Eyal wrote in his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. I share, therefore I am.
Some users get a good response when they post something on social media, while most sit waiting for anyone to care. And the more unpredictable this interaction is, the more the user is addicted. You don’t want to miss out on anything. You don’t gain happiness from such prolonged routines—rather, according to Eyal, you experience feelings of boredom, frustration, passivity and isolation.
For many people, it’s about FOMO, the “fear of missing out,” or “the fear of losing a special moment.” Eyal describes this as the brilliant driver for Instagram. And this last part is true: the app at the very least is nearly brilliant. But that moment which he is referring to is not necessarily something special. On the contrary. There aren’t enough special moments, so we end up making do—repetitive and mundane moments are documented instead.
In the spring of 1984, I returned home to Norway after sailing in a thirty-five-foot boat to West Africa, and then across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and back again over the same ocean. My friends and I were gone for eight months. This was in the old days, before the expansion of the internet, so we hadn’t received any news from Norway. The only exceptions were letters from girlfriends, friends and family that were sent poste restante to the harbours where we were expected. Back home again, I pored over newspapers and radio programmes the way I had habitually done before we’d set sail. I was surprised to realize that the news and debate programmes were broadcasting almost exactly the same content as when we had left the previous autumn. Politicians were mostly debating the same questions with one another. Even the arguments were the same.
When you’ve invested a lot of time in being accessible and keeping up with what’s happening, it’s easy to conclude that it all has a certain value, even if what you have done might not be that important. This is called rationalization. The New York Review of Books has labelled the battle between producers of apps “the new opium wars,” and the paper claims that “marketers have adopted addiction as an explicit commercial strategy.” The only difference is that the pushers aren’t peddling a product that can be smoked in a pipe, but rather is ingested via sugar-coated apps.
In a way, silence is the opposite of all of this. It’s about getting inside what you are doing. Experiencing rather than overthinking. Allowing each moment to be big enough. Not living through other people and other things. Shutting out the world and fashioning your own silence whenever you run, cook food, have sex, study, chat, work, think of a new idea, read or dance.