Sitting with silence

How constant noise has replaced reflection, and why reclaiming silence might be the most radical thing we can do.

There is a certain emptiness in my chest, one I hadn’t realised was there until I stopped filling my time with podcasts, online videos, and the steady stream of digital noise that has become the background music of modern life. The sadness that followed wasn’t the kind that makes you cry. It was quieter than that. It hummed softly beneath the surface, pulling my lips into a straight line and causing my eyebrows to tense. I had mistaken distraction for peace. What I had been doing all this time wasn’t choosing rest but avoiding stillness.

We often disguise our inability to sit with silence under the mask of productivity. We convince ourselves that listening to self-improvement podcasts in the morning or scrolling through inspirational posts counts as growth. But in truth, it’s a kind of running away. In online spaces, you can find endless videos of people confessing how they can’t even clean their kitchen without an audiobook or a YouTube video playing in the background. They say it’s about multitasking, but underneath the humour, something deeper is revealed they cannot bear to be alone with their thoughts. It’s escapism disguised as self-improvement, entertainment disguised as connection.

And it’s no coincidence that this pattern has become so universal. We’ve built a culture that rewards constant consumption, whether it’s information, content, or even emotions. We scroll through strangers’ lives hoping to find a sense of belonging, but what we usually find are shadows of meaning. The silence that follows when we finally put the phone down feels unbearable, because it forces us to face what we’ve been avoiding: the emptiness that lies beneath all this noise.

We’ve become so wrapped up in our digital identities that our real sense of self is slowly fading. We upload pieces of ourselves, our smiles, our meals, our opinions, and expect them to add up to something authentic. But they never do. Each post is just a fragment, a carefully edited version that distances us further from who we truly are. The more we curate, the more uncertain we become. And when the digital mask slips, when we’re left alone and unfiltered, the silence feels almost punishing.

The ability to sit with our thoughts matters more than we realise. It’s in silence that we come to understand ourselves, and in reflection that we repair what life has blurred. But for many of us, silence now brings anxiety instead of clarity. The gap between who we are online and who we are alone has widened, and in that gap grow self-doubt and self-criticism. We replay conversations, scroll through imagined judgments, and call it thinking. Somewhere along the way, the voice in our heads turned against us.

It’s not just adults who are living like this. It’s even more heart-breaking when you see it in children and adolescents. The digital world has stolen something sacred from them, a slow, unguarded childhood filled with discovery and mistakes. Instead of learning patience or imagination, many children learn instant gratification. Their friendships happen through screens, their sense of self is tied to likes, and their ability to cope with boredom or emotional discomfort is thinning by the day. Without boredom, resilience never grows. Without quiet, reflection cannot take root.

And yet, I don’t think the solution is to abandon technology entirely. That’s not realistic, nor necessary. The answer lies in reclaiming our attention, reintroducing small doses of silence into our days until it no longer feels foreign. It could be as simple as going for a walk without headphones, eating a meal without checking messages, or sitting in stillness before bed. These are not acts of deprivation, but rebellion. In a world that begs for our attention, stillness is an act of freedom.

There’s something spiritual about rediscovering silence. When the noise settles, we begin to notice small details, the way sunlight moves across the floor, the rhythm of our breath, the quiet hum of life that never left us. It’s in these moments that we begin to sense something larger than ourselves. Some might call it presence, others might call it God. Whatever name you give it, it’s the feeling of returning home to something true.

The emptiness I once felt doesn’t scare me anymore. It still appears sometimes, resting gently on my chest, but I’ve learned not to rush to fill it. Instead, I see it as an invitation, an opening for reflection, or prayer and to learn what my soul looks like. Maybe that’s what our generation is missing: not more information, but more moments of real offline connection and moments of stillness where we can finally hear the sound of our own souls.

That’s all from this chatterbox today.

With love, always.

Ariana <3