Noise of culture isn’t evil, but it drowns out what really matters

There was nothing particularly wrong with the place.

The lights were bright. The music consisted of old hits from the time when Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan were president. The decor was brightly colored plastic. There were people everywhere, including a table of teen girls making TikTok videos.

There was nothing offensive about any of it, but it was bland and boring and distracting. You could have been anywhere in the country. I tried to write. I tried to read.

And yet, after a while, I felt a quiet urge to leave.

I stepped outside into the warm evening breeze and stood still. As the door slowly closed behind me, the drop in noise was almost physical. The air felt different. The world slowed down just enough for me to notice it again.

And in that moment, I realized — once again — something I’ve observed more and more over the last decade or so. There’s nothing wrong with most of what our culture produces. Not really.

It’s not evil. It’s not low-quality. In many cases, it’s the opposite. It’s engaging and creative and well-made. It’s designed by people who know exactly how to capture your attention and hold it.

That’s not the problem. The problem is that there’s too much of it.

There are too many voices layered on top of each other.

A podcast in the car. Music playing in the background. A video while I eat. A habit of reaching for my phone the moment there’s a pause — just to see what’s new, what I’ve missed, what else I could be taking in.

None of those things are bad. Some of them are good.

But they don’t come one at a time. They stack. One after another. Sometimes on top of each other. And after a while, there’s no silence left.

No space to think. No space to feel.

No space to notice the quiet things that actually matter — the weight of a conversation, the presence of another person, the stillness of the world around me — or the sense that God might be trying to say something I can’t quite hear.

When something feels off in our lives, the culture offers a simple answer.

More.

More distraction. More input. More things to fill the space.

And for a moment, it works. It always works for a moment.

But the relief never lasts, because the problem was never that something was missing. It was that too much was already there.

What I’m actually craving isn’t something new to add to my life. It’s things to remove. I want to strip away the constant input that keeps everything at the surface.

That sounds simple. It isn’t.

Because the culture doesn’t feel like something we need to escape from. It feels like something we’re drawn toward. It’s enjoyable. It’s normal. It’s everywhere.

It quietly asks subtle and invisible questions that are hard to ignore:

Don’t you want this?

Don’t you want to feel what everyone else is feeling?

Don’t you want to be part of what everyone else is doing?

Saying no to that doesn’t feel like a moral decision. It feels like stepping away from life itself. And yet, the more I pay attention, the more I realize that what I find on the other side of that decision isn’t less life.

It’s more.

More clarity. More peace. More awareness of what’s real and what actually matters. But that’s true only when there’s enough silence to notice it.

I’m not trying to say that the culture is evil. I’m saying that everything our culture creates has become a tsunami of distraction that adds up to scrambled minds and distracted hearts.

I can’t make the culture go away. But I’m trying to create space within it for sanity and quiet and contemplation. I’m trying to remove what doesn’t need to be there.

Because right now, the greatest threat to feeling fully human isn’t that we don’t have enough. It’s that we have so much that we can’t hear or feel much of anything that matters.

And the only way I know to change that isn’t by adding something new.

It’s by having the discipline to remove things that distract us from what really matters.

Note: You can find a video version of this article on YouTube. Click here.