More Signal Please – Brett Eddy

Are you living truly in the moment – living with purpose in a specific direction with laser focus on your calling, intent, actions, and motivation?

Or do you also suffer from a truly modern dilemma where we have

too much noise and not enough signal?

I challenge us to go for five minutes in a crowd and see if we can go without seeing a single person gazing at their cell phone. I challenge us to step outside of that vignette and scan the same crowd and find the one person who has a sublime look of satisfaction and content on their face. I challenge us then, to look inside of ourselves and observe what’s there.

I think that we will observe as I have in the last year

that we are bombarded by terabytes of digital noise and very little signal is getting through.

The signal that I am talking about is the intentional narrative and the relevant energy that transforms and builds us into better people. The noise I am talking about is the constant, demanding context-less stream of un-asked-for content. Whether it is the always-on infocast from Facebook, the thousands of (daily!) twitter posts we have not read, the thumb-flipping news feeds like Pulse, Flipboard, CNN, etc on our iPhones – the deluge of noise is paralyzing to our synaptic attention spans.

Are we getting better, smarter, and more compassionate because of this multi-channel data feed?

I submit to you we are not. I could even crack open my iPhone 6 and google “social media anxiety” and I bet there would be counselors in ever town in America who could help me with some related malady. However, at its core – it is passive albeit invasive – and I, we, take hundreds of time-slices a day and bring it in. But it doesn’t help us – perhaps it hurts us.

The good news? We can stop.

I personally believe in taking a “digital-sabbath” at least once a week. I believe that I need to be intentional about ingesting the signal that matters – and reduce the noise that doesn’t.

Give it a try. The worst thing that may happen is that you quiet your spirit and enhance your soul. The feed will always be there – but the signal may get lost.