In Pursuit of Silence

A far flung silence

It was like some Attenborough-esque quest to locate a nearly extinct wild animal hiding in a vast wilderness. An elusive prize in the remote recesses of the world.

I had traversed over 21,000km - from the shores of the Southern Ocean, across the bulk of the Earth. Most of it ensconced in a hurtling metal tube, the low grade hum of giant Pratt Whitney turbofan engines punctuated by the occasional foray into the glittering pseudo reality that is airport transit terminals.?

As they say, ‘as the plane gets smaller the adventure gets bigger’. And my transport and destinations shrunk and shrunk and shrunk until I was finally left alone with nothing more than a laden blue snowsled - a journey now on foot deep into the unhinged Laplandian Arctic.??

(pic - crossing a frozen lake overnight during the 503km Montane Lapland Arctic Ultra 2023)

All to immerse myself in something that appears almost extinct in the modern world.?

Silence.

Not the kind of silence that comes from having the kids in bed and the TV off.

This is a deep silence that permeates every fibre.?

Startling in its weight and expanse.?

Over the course of 8 days and a handful of hours I would stride across 503km (314 miles) of Europe's last great wilderness. (You can read my race report here ) In those moments when the wind was stilled and the Earth unmoved, there was literally nothing but my laboured breath and pounding heartbeat, perhaps the slightest crunch of ice and snow underfoot as my body shifted ever so slightly under a harnessed load.?

No humans as far as the eye could see. And we could see far. Nature frozen and bent under the slowly yielding yoke of winter.?

Sound can be measured in decibels - but true silence is not simply a score of zero.?

In its purest form, silence is an ideal. A concept. A resource.

A wordless teacher, offering a syllabus of staggering proportions.

Let me make the case for silence.

An Irrational Fear

We have all but driven silence from our lives. Almost to the point of total eradication.?

Not from predation or habitat destruction. We have pushed silence into the far reaches of our existence out of fear, out of a lack of understanding, out of a misguided sense of purpose. We have constructed lives and habits and all manner of devices to avoid being left alone with…well, ourselves.

Constantly searching for fresh and vital purpose to draw our attention outwards, to achieve escape velocity from introspection.

Because being alone and undistracted - is simply too terrifying.

And before you grab your pitchforks and blame Zuckerberg et al for stealing your solitude, know that this is not a modern affliction. Philosophers were bemoaning this back in the 1600’s

“All of humanity's problems, stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone”

- Blaise Pascal 1623-1662

But surely the default position of the universe is entropy and chaos? Surely the pursuit of silence is to go against the grain of nature herself? Nice try Deeprak Chopshop but no dice. The universe's default position is one of dark, cold, silence, but that’s a tale for another time.?

So why are we so utterly terrified of silence??

1. Being stuck with your crazy roommate
2. Outright boredom
3. Experiential Poverty

Your Crazy Roommate?

Silence leaves us with nothing but the internal conversation. No distraction, no ‘urgent’ need to attend to. Nothing. The sheer prospect of what may surface in those moments for many is a concept too unfathomable to bear. We are left alone with an entity that Naval Ravikant refers to as our ‘crazy roommate’ - the monkey mind running around inside your cranium, sometimes thinking deep thoughts, sometimes flinging poop at the walls.

“The most important relationship you have is with yourself—it's with this voice in your head that is constantly rattling every waking hour. It's this crazy roommate living inside your mind who's always chattering [and] never shuts up. And you can't control these thoughts—they just come up out of you don't even know where ... Those conversations you're having in your head all the time—that is your world ... That's going to determine the quality of your life more than anything else.” - Naval Ravikant

No one likes having poop flung around their cranium, but even more terrifying is what other thoughts suddenly surge to your forebrain having seen their chance to escape from the dusty recesses.?

Silence allows you to start processing the mental inbox. Clear the spam, work through some of the important stuff, maybe unsubscribed from some now-defunct beliefs. A work email inbox at zero feels good, but a mental inbox at zero is an order of magnitude beyond.?

We understand the power of ‘deep work’, blocking off those units of time (with or without your overpriced fancy pomodoro timer) to do our ‘best work’ - but for some reason we struggle to translate that same policy to mental upkeep.?

Outright Boredom.

The dire need to be doing something, anything, even if that something is as pointless and mind numbing as scrolling the many and varied curated stills of other peoples supposed lives.?

If you want some empirical data to back that up, try this on for size:

“The report from psychologists at Virginia and Harvard Universities is one of a surprising few to tackle the question of why most of us find it so hard to do nothing.

In more than 11 separate studies, the researchers showed that people hated being left to think, regardless of their age, education, income or the amount they used smartphones or social media.

Timothy Wilson , who led the work, said the findings were not necessarily a reflection of the pace of modern life or the spread of mobile devices and social media. Instead, those things might be popular because of our constant urge to do something rather than nothing.

But the most staggering result was yet to come. To check whether people might actually prefer something bad to nothing at all, the students were given the option of administering a mild electric shock.

They had been asked earlier to rate how unpleasant the shocks were, alongside other options, such as looking at pictures of cockroaches or hearing the sound of a knife rubbing against a bottle.

All the students picked for the test said they would pay to avoid mild electric shocks after receiving a demonstration.

To the researchers' surprise, 12 of 18 men gave themselves up to four electric shocks, as did six of 24 women.

"What is striking is that simply being alone with their thoughts was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid," the scientists write in Science .

The study above gained greater notoriety in part due to a single outlier, one participant managed to rack up an impressive 190 self-administered shocks during the experiment.

Maybe his thoughts were terrifying, maybe he just liked a jolt..

This led me to thinking whether this abject fear of boredom is about the lack of counterbalance - the rest of our lives is so devoid of challenging or complex activity, that boredom doesn’t stand as a welcome respite from the hardships of the day. It doesn’t feel like a healthy opportunity to rest and recharge because we’ve done nothing of import from which to recover.?

You don’t need down time if you really haven’t had any serious up-time.

We are bored and stimulated, busy and unchallenged. An easily distracted, hyper aware, somewhat perplexed animal.?

And that leads us to the final point.

Experiential Poverty.

If I'm bored I clearly lack purpose.?

And with lack of purpose must come lack of drive and ambition.?

Unworthy of the unforgiving minute. How can I post about my successful life if I can’t even muster sufficient importance to be busy right now?

Most of us can’t even procrastinate properly.?

We mask our procrastination in the apparent busyness of the mundane and most likely unnecessary. Look at how many things are on my to do list - carefully colour coded and allocated in my Notion template, that I spent hours crafting. Let me cross off a myriad of minutiae and bask in the psychological comfort of a person busy and productive.?

If only any of it mattered.?

It appears to truly be a feat of epic mental gymnastics to be able to see the act of doing nothing, intentionally seeking and residing in a portion of silence - as a purposeful act in and of itself.?

Finding purpose in the doing of nothing.?

Back to the Wilderness.

I eventually found my silence in the far frozen reaches of the world.?

But even there I had to search for it, let it in, it was very much not a passive act. It tooks days and nights of endless movement and solitude to sink back into the well.?

Thankfully you don’t need to emulate that (I mean you can if you want but it’s not mandatory). Silence is somewhat more elusive here - but with the flick of a few switches, the removal of a few devices and a commitment of time and space the silence is there - it’s the default state of 99.9% of the known universe - you can’t miss it. Unless you want to.?

True power lies in being unborable.?

To move through the mundane and numbing and even pointless - to arrive at the other side and reflect on the beauty of movement, or clarity of undistracted thought.?

To have the mental endurance of a heavy stone.?

To weather the unimaginably mundane and not be bothered in the slightest.?

To welcome the quietest of voices from the deepest recesses of the soul.

(This piece was originally posted in my substack - paulwatkins.substack (.com) - you can sign up for free to get these early plus the articles I don't post here.)