The media want us to believe that if we don’t participate in the current frenzy of video games, sitcoms, electronics, fashion, celebrity, movies, music, consumerism, Facebook and Pinterest and Instagram and Tweeting, and general noise, that we are somehow “missing out.” On what, exactly?
The alternative is simplicity, freedom from desire and from want, freedom from debt and discontent, freedom from comparisons, time to spend with books and ideas, face time with friends, time to listen to the trees or to your own spirit.
What’s wrong with any of that?
There is nothing at all wrong with it for someone who desires autonomy, a self-directed rather than an other-directed life. Those whose lives transpire between Facebook and Instagram have never fully faced the certainty of Death. Death awareness plunges one into those depths from which all this surface noise is distraction and waste.
I know that it’s in my nature to be judgmental, so I want to be careful in what I say. But my own sense in much of this is that many people are simply afraid of the silence. They don’t want to listen to the still voice within for fear of what it might tell them.