When Distractions Aren’t Enough
Joel Erhardt on quieting the noise to find truth beyond facts
Joel Erhardt is in his first year of doctoral studies at ICS. Studying under Neal DeRoo, Joel's research investigates how interpretation and lived experience shape the meaning we make of the world, and what this reveals about living as a whole and fulfilled self (hermeneutic phenomenology).
“The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes of all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning, we cannot begin to see. Unless we see, we cannot think. The purification must begin with the mass media. How?”
— Thomas Merton
Most mornings, the first thing I do is check my phone for updates on sports, social media, and my calendar app. During this, my dog, Charlie, normally battles with my phone for my attention. Instinctively, this routine is bad for my mental health, and yet I continue it. I am still surprised that the more information and noise I consume, the more anxious, unsettled, and detached I feel. Many of these feelings and effects of our information overload can be found in what philosophers call the “post-truth era.” The post-truth era refers to a cultural and political context where “objective facts” are less influential in shaping what we think, know, and believe. In this environment, the clarity of “truth” doesn’t feel as strong as it once did. Instead, what counts as truth is mixed with many different things that push and pull our attention, leaving us confused, anxious, and isolated. In seeking direction out of this state, I find it helpful to turn to friends, family, and my favourite writers and thinkers for insight.
One thinker that I have grown to really appreciate is Thomas Merton. Merton is an American writer, poet, philosopher, and monk, known for his work on contemplation, social justice, and inter-religious dialogue. Decades ago, Merton noticed Western culture’s exhaustion, linking it to the constant news and information we receive and describing it as noise in our minds.¹ Today, our modern news cycle has not differed much from when Merton was writing. Whenever we turn on the TV and watch the news, we are often bombarded with a seemingly endless stream of events, horrors, and negative messages that rarely help us understand the world. Instead, it provides us with noise, distractions, and fear.
In warning, Merton warns that this overload fuels an inner division within ourselves. Instead of a “true self” found in genuine, authentic relationships with others and ourselves, we become disoriented and uprooted, creating a division that separates us from ourselves, a division that Merton calls the “false self.”² That being said, the division has occurred throughout history; Merton hints that our particular era is uniquely disintegrated.
“I am as ready as the next man to admire the astonishing achievements of technology. Taken by themselves, they are magnificent. But taken in the context of unbalance with the other aspects of human existence in the world, the very splendour and rapidity of technological development is a factor of disintegration… What I am saying is, then, that it does us no good to make fantastic progress if we do not know how to live with it, if we cannot make good use of it, and if, in fact, our technology becomes nothing more than an expensive and complicated way of cultural [or personal] disintegration.”³
In contrast to the false self and our divided inner life, Merton describes the true self as our real, unfiltered self, found through honest reflection.⁴ He imagines the true self to be like a “jewel from the bottom of the sea,” and he suggests we should recover it from the everyday noise.⁵ Though Merton doesn’t offer a full answer, his ideas give us a starting point: that we have to learn how to slow down and quiet ourselves. However, this is easier said than done.
I find that the easiest times to quiet my head are when I’m near a body of water. To me, there is something calming and relaxing about the sound of the waves and the vision of the endless horizon. This feeling became apparent to me when a family member mentioned they felt better after taking some time away from Toronto following a vacation in Florida. Of course, I wanted to reply sarcastically, saying, “Wow, that’s shocking.” But it can be difficult to find and carve out a space where we can ground ourselves and reintegrate. Even more so, it may be hard for others to have opportunities, time, or money to do so.
For me, it’s especially difficult to slow down and quiet myself. I love technology, and I can spend hours fine-tuning my phone or laptop with the right settings and apps to improve productivity. Ironically, my constant fixation on setting up a productivity system kept me from calming down, re-centring myself, and focusing on what matters. In other words, I think my need to be productive was masking internal wounds or narratives that needed addressing. Rather than pausing to reflect, I filled my time and mind with what I felt was valuable. Unfortunately, our culture does not give us the time and space to reflect.
Whatever your circumstances, there is one important caveat worth mentioning. To achieve some silence, reintegration, or stillness in our lives, we should not rely solely on willpower. Our usual response to noise is to try harder. We see this when we use timers or a calendar app to block out our day and stay organized and on task. These tools are helpful, and intentional goal-setting is a good practice, but the same routines that organize our day cannot, by themselves, provide genuine healing and reorientation.
Simone Weil, another philosopher, offers some clarity on this. Weil distinguishes between attente (attention-as-waiting) and a wilful effort.⁶ For Weil, attention and waiting are not separate things that we choose. Instead, waiting is a characteristic of genuine attention. In trying to wilfully force silence, we inadvertently preclude attention by tightening our grip. Whereas, in attention—that patient and receptive waiting—we loosen our grip and allow ourselves and the world around us to affect us receptively. For me, my wilful effort was to ignore some of the precipitating factors that might limit my ability to be more present to others. Instead, waiting meant letting go of trying to do it all by myself and allowing someone else to help. In a world where noise and reaction pull at us, learning to wait attentively offers a re-centring that helps us engage with the world more fully.
To break through the post-truth noise clouding our direction and vision, we need to take concrete action, but not by trying harder. Instead, we can allow for quiet moments in the morning, during a mindful walk, or by turning off notifications before bed, to practice patient waiting and silence. Though this practice won’t solve our post-truth crisis, I believe it’s a helpful first step in combating all the noise. Whatever silent practice you choose, what matters is recognising that our constant input is overwhelming and that practicing silence, stillness, or contemplation will not draw us away from the world; rather, it will help us enter the post-truth era with a more grounded, authentic self.
“The first act of love is always the giving of attention.”
— Dallas Willard
Endnotes
¹ Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 72.
² Merton, Seeds of Contemplation, 38.
³ Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 72–73.
⁴ Merton, Seeds of Contemplation, 38.
⁵ Merton, Seeds of Contemplation, 38.
⁶ Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 1st complete English language ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 117.
Please join us in celebrating the launch of Neal DeRoo’s Material Spirituality: A Transcendental Phenomenology of Religion on Thursday, May 28, 2026, at Knox College in Toronto. The evening will include conversation, conviviality, and celebration of Neal’s newest book, which offers a fresh phenomenological account of how spirituality shapes our experience of the world. Please RSVP at icscanada.edu/deroo-launch.
thank you Joel for this timely and thoughtful reflection. It is much needed wisdom for our time.
Ann