{"id":39045,"date":"2026-04-04T21:00:18","date_gmt":"2026-04-05T02:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/?p=39045"},"modified":"2026-04-06T06:17:34","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T11:17:34","slug":"noise-of-culture-isnt-evil-but-it-drowns-out-what-really-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/?p=39045","title":{"rendered":"Noise of culture isn\u2019t evil, but it drowns out what really matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There was nothing particularly wrong with the place.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And yet, after a while, I felt\u00a0a quiet urge to leave.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And in that moment, I realized \u2014 once again \u2014 something I\u2019ve observed more and more over the last decade or so. There\u2019s nothing wrong with most of what our culture produces. Not really.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not evil. It\u2019s not low-quality. In many cases, it\u2019s the opposite. It\u2019s engaging and creative and well-made. It\u2019s designed by people who know exactly how to capture your attention and hold it.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not the problem. The problem is that there\u2019s too much of it.<\/p>\n

There are too many voices layered on top of each other.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s a pause \u2014 just to see what\u2019s new, what I\u2019ve missed, what else I could be taking in.<\/p>\n

None of those things are bad. Some of them are good.<\/p>\n

But they don\u2019t come one at a time. They stack. One after another. Sometimes on top of each other. And after a while, there\u2019s no silence left.<\/p>\n

No space to think. No space to feel.<\/p>\n

No space to notice the quiet things that actually matter \u2014 the weight of a conversation, the presence of another person, the stillness of the world around me \u2014 or the sense that God might be trying to say something I can\u2019t quite hear.<\/p>\n

When something feels off in our lives, the culture offers a simple answer.<\/p>\n

More.<\/p>\n

More distraction. More input. More things to fill the space.<\/p>\n

And for a moment, it works. It always works for a moment.<\/p>\n

But the relief never lasts, because the problem was never that something was missing. It was that too much was already there.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019m actually craving isn\u2019t something new to add to my life. It\u2019s things to remove. I want to strip away the constant input that keeps everything at the surface.<\/p>\n

That sounds simple. It isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Because the culture doesn\u2019t feel like something we need to escape from. It feels like something we\u2019re drawn toward. It\u2019s enjoyable. It\u2019s normal. It\u2019s everywhere.<\/p>\n

It quietly asks subtle and invisible questions that are hard to ignore:<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t you want this?<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t you want to feel what everyone else is feeling?<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t you want to be part of what everyone else is doing?<\/p>\n

Saying no to that doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t less life.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s more.<\/p>\n

More clarity. More peace. More awareness of what\u2019s real and what actually matters. But that’s true only when there\u2019s enough silence to notice it.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

I can’t make the culture go away. But I\u2019m trying to create space within it for sanity and quiet and contemplation. I’m trying to remove what doesn\u2019t need to be there.<\/p>\n

Because right now, the greatest threat to feeling fully human isn\u2019t that we don\u2019t have enough. It\u2019s that we have so much that we can\u2019t hear or feel much of anything that matters.<\/p>\n

And the only way I know to change that isn\u2019t by adding something new.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s by having the discipline to remove things that distract us from what really matters.<\/p>\n

Note:<\/strong> You can find a video version of this article on YouTube. Click here.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 Keep Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-39045","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1x9iR-a9L","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39045"}],"version-history":[{"count":32,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39045\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39094,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39045\/revisions\/39094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}