The Noise Floor
When the signal gets lost in the static
Category: The Digital Age
The noise never stops. Notifications, opinions, updates, breaking news, takes, counter-takes. Somewhere underneath all of it is what actually matters to you. But finding it requires a kind of excavation you weren’t trained for.
The Hum
There’s a sound your refrigerator makes. You don’t hear it. You heard it the first day, maybe the first week, and then your brain filed it away under constant, ignorable, not a threat. It became part of the room. Part of the silence. You only notice it when the power goes out and everything goes truly quiet and you realize the silence has a shape you’d forgotten.
The Static
When the noise gets loud enough, long enough, it stops sounding like noise. It sounds like silence. Like the refrigerator hum. You forget it’s there. You forget what actual quiet sounds like. You mistake the static for your own thoughts. And that’s when you’re really lost.
The Signal
Someone asked you a simple question. What do you want? And you opened your mouth and nothing came out. Not because the answer was complicated. Because you genuinely didn’t know. You could tell them what you should want. What the internet said you should want. But what you wanted? The signal was gone.