I stopped charging my phone beside my bed four years ago and have never regretted it. Alarm clocks seemed destined to go the way of the DVD, but I am on a solo mission to restore them to bedside tables around the world. The harsh tone of the alarm is certainly no match for what Spotify can give us, but it’s worth avoiding the 30 minutes of doomscrolling that the phone inevitably causes. Since making the switch from the waking blue-light bath, I have rediscovered those early hours of the morning, with their associated peace and silence, before children and work invade my limited headspace. Carving out that half hour before the noise begins has helped restructure my priorities in life.
Every year the Pope chooses a preacher for the Roman Curia’s annual Lenten retreat at the Vatican. This year it was Bishop Erik Varden, who has gained a devoted, albeit small, following for his work with Gregorian chant, as well as for his spiritual reflections on our age. Over the past few months, I have been working through a recommendation by him, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, as part of my early morning routine. This collection of aphorisms and stories from the early age of Christian monasticism in the East contains beautiful nuggets of Christian wisdom just as relevant for our present age as for the age in which it was written.
By contrast, it strikes me how much noise we are subjected to in the modern world – noise our ancestors were able to avoid. This is one of the reasons I closed all my social media accounts many years ago: I have no desire to allow other people’s noise into my life. Notably, Bishop Varden is a Trappist – the religious order predominantly known for its silence – and perhaps that is what we need more of today.
If you want an amusing read that also throws in a few life lessons, I strongly recommend The Money Game. Written under the pseudonym Adam Smith, it is a quirky collection of anecdotes and philosophy about market trading from a stock-picker a few decades ago. One of the key phrases from this book is: “If you really know what’s going on, you don’t even need to know what’s going on to know what’s going on.” Remembering this phrase will probably save you a lot of time on social media: turn it off, you probably already know what’s going on. I find the phrase also useful in assessing the “podcast wars,” as they have come to be known. Battle lines between “America First” and the new, MAGA-aligned neocons have been emerging for years. Again, if you really knew what was going on, you could have seen this from a mile off. Diplomacy between the two sides has been deteriorating for years, and it seems my good friend Michael Knowles might be about the last man trying to straddle both worlds. Michael is probably the nicest man you could ever meet; it is a testament to the current political lunacy that, for some reason, he has been canceled more than most. With the declining relevance of cable news – apart from as a boomer echo chamber – it is worth watching debates between top podcasters as an indicator of the cultural direction of travel. We are seeing the cycle of “new media to new politics” shorten, and this will continue to accelerate as linear media declines. Look no further than the poll showing AOC as the favorite to lead the Democrats in 2028. I doubt many institutional Democrats would have answered this way, but new media is defining new paths to leadership.
One area where there is a rapidly growing disconnect between the new and the old is in the understanding of the recent rise in Christianity. The milquetoast “Jesus was just a nice guy” Christianity of the 1970s and 1980s is being replaced by a more full-throated attestation among young converts that Jesus came not “to bring peace, but a sword.” Christ did not ask us to be lukewarm. That attitude is totally at odds with the live-and-let-live politics of the past 60 years: God cannot actively will the plurality of religions because He cannot actively will sin. The secular and traditionally liberal media cannot grasp this mode of thinking because few of them understand religion in this way. As C.S. Lewis once wrote: “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.”
It seems the younger generation is taking on the message of infinite importance, while the older cohort – accustomed to a lifetime of comparative peace and comfort – is more reluctant to draw the proverbial sword. All of this is perhaps a call for depth over drift and a pushback against the superficiality of our noisy age. Buy an alarm clock, delete social media and turn off your phone.
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