Empty Noise Less Useful Than Wind

If it were merely the wind, it would at least serve a healthful purpose, but the world is full of noise which is less than useless.
When I pass through the public sphere, listening to people yakking on cellphones, the vast majority of it is recounting yet another conversation with someone else. And the next call recounts that one, and I could swear lying about most of it. Do these people even really know each other? They slurp up great measures of each other’s lives, yet they hardly know themselves.
It seems we have no end of shortages of this and that, and the whole world cries out for more of one thing or another. I’ve often said the primary problem is emptiness of soul. The real problem is not lack of productivity of hands, but an unproductive soul.
What does it really take to live? Not nearly so much as most whine for, but the real emptiness is not of the hands. People want stuff as an alternative form of entertainment. Entertainment which builds is almost impossible to find these days; all of it seems merely to divert, if not destroy. God gave entertainment as a means to refill the creativity. We consume it in place of creativity.
When you consider something so horrific as the vast and unbearable debt load on national economies, you can be sure some major portion of that was the result of seeking various forms of entertainment. Very little of it was spent on actual life support. When your soul is full and ready to pour out, you hardly care very much about all that stuff people spend money and mortgages on.
I was once a member of the could-not-possibly-shut-up crowd as a child. At some point, after constant emotional bruising, I realized few people actually cared a whit about me (if only perhaps they simply didn’t know how). It wasn’t about me at all. It’s not they were filled souls, but they were just as self-absorbed as I. Until I was able to pour my useless self out, nothing good could fill the space. No, it was hardly a single event in time and space, but a long process.
Part of the process was making those long lonely walks and running long distances. Being alone with myself became pretty comfortable. Now it is downright essential. Even during my thirties, I noted it was a blessing to be able to close out the world every once in awhile and be alone. In reality, I was never really alone, but alone with God.
It’s not a discipline to pray two or three hours at a time; it’s a necessity of aching desire. There is so very much wrong with me it takes God hours to fix the smallest things so I can present a new sliver of His truth to the world. I’m not exactly fond of isolation, but it beats the quality of fellowship I find in a world where Satan has very nearly succeeded in destroying the concept of contemplation. I don’t begrudge the noisy brats people bring across my path, but the reason for, and flavor of, their noise. They are so dependent on TV, movies and games as drugs, they can’t imagine. That is, their imagination is constrained by what has been fed them through a semi-hypnotic medium and all that rich creativity is already withered. I don’t dislike children at all, but I prefer being alone than with a dozen different copies of what’s on TV for kids, personified in the kids who watch it endlessly.
You know, I won’t miss this “civilization” at all when it dies.