Every public space has the emptiness filled with music. We all want our earbuds on and music or podcasts playing in the background always.
The slow-moving part of ourselves that lives in quiet no longer gets fed. The fast-acting sector of our mind is flooded with an unending flow of shallow information every moment.
We're continually engaged by the rapid and random access to a superabundance of information online, TV channel surfing (because some better unknown thing is probably on the next channel), or the all-to-familiar scroll down the social media feed.
We've had our minds trained to access information rapidly, and we're terrific at that now, but to sit quietly and think, read, and transfer these short-term memories into the long term storage of our minds is nearly impossible. We forget more in a day than we remember in a month.
That transfer of information is vital. It strengthens our mind and gives a depth to the quality of memory we store.
The rapid and easy access to overwhelming information feels like a good thing, and it has its merits, but among the downsides are that it is only a fleeting and shallow knowledge we can acquire.
We lose the ability (and comfort) of sitting quietly and thinking, reading or examining a piece of artwork for periods longer than a couple of minutes.
We need the space filled with music or sound at all times, and we live with a constant fear of missing out–and we don't even realize we've changed.
The grocery store sounds like elevator music, not footsteps, carts wheeling about, and muffled conversations. The extra space is filled with music, and our noisy minds prefer that.
When the mind is filled with passive entertainment, we leave little room for focus, peace, and meditative thought.
Unplugging and quietly focusing on a single thing/task for a period of 15-60 minutes is the hardest thing of all for most of us.