ON LIVING IN THE NOISE
Finding Space to Breathe Amidst Political, Social, and Digital Chaos
The world has never been louder.
Every scroll, every headline, every notification seems designed to provoke. Politics becomes theatre. News cycles blur into one another. Algorithms feed us outrage and call it connection. Noise isn’t background anymore—it’s the water we swim in.
But here’s the paradox: in a culture obsessed with being heard, we are forgetting how to listen. To each other. To the quiet. To ourselves.
I know this because I’ve lived it. For years I drowned out discomfort with achievement. When grief came, I buried it in busyness. When silence felt unbearable, I filled it with podcasts, news feeds, music, anything to stop the stillness from speaking.
Sobriety was my first real silence. At first it was terrifying. Mornings stretched out too wide, too empty. But eventually I realised silence wasn’t absence. It was presence. A kind of space that revealed what the noise had been masking.
I see the same pattern in my clients. Leaders who look successful but feel restless. Parents whose lives are full but never feel fulfilled. People who aren’t burned out from doing too little, but from being saturated with too much.
Noise convinces us we’re falling behind. That we must do more, earn more, consume more. And when the world isn’t loud enough, we add to it ourselves—scrolling, streaming, refreshing. We collude in our own distraction, because silence can feel unbearable.
And yet, silence is where the real work begins.
One of the simplest practices I’ve found is breath. Ten slow breaths, and I notice how much noise has entered my body—tension in the chest, racing in the mind—and how quickly it shifts when I stop. Breathwork isn’t just a technique. It’s a way of reclaiming attention.
Neuroscience calls this the “default mode network”—the part of the brain that activates when we stop doing. It’s where imagination and integration happen. But in a life without pauses, this network never gets a chance. We lose not just rest, but the capacity to reflect, to create, to be human.
And that loss is costly. Because the noise is not neutral—it’s profitable. Entire industries are built on capturing our attention, keeping us outraged, ensuring we never have to face the emptiness of stillness. Outrage is addictive because it keeps us scrolling. Noise is lucrative because it keeps us numb.
Stillness is resistance.
It doesn’t mean withdrawal from the world, but learning to pause long enough to hear your own signal through the static. It means remembering that clarity doesn’t come from consuming more, but from listening within.
Because silence doesn’t empty us. It fills us. With perspective. With possibility. With the courage to act from alignment rather than reaction.
If you feel buried in noise, you’re not alone. It is the defining condition of our time. But the work is not to escape it completely. It’s to remember you don’t have to live inside it.
This is what I explore with clients—how to cut through the noise and reconnect with clarity. It’s also a thread running through my book, The Conscious Currency.
