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Disturbing your silence is my job but I want to make a little room for peace

We are surrounded by ways to pull us out of our inner life, to keep our thoughts shallow and feelings not fully explored

'I try to make enticing social media posts and catchy headlines, to pull readers out of their worlds, away from their own thoughts.' Photograph: Yui Mok/PA
'I try to make enticing social media posts and catchy headlines, to pull readers out of their worlds, away from their own thoughts.' Photograph: Yui Mok/PA
Genevieve Carbery's picture
Genevieve Carbery
Wed Jan 08 2025 - 06:00

“Hello from somewhere in the sky over Brussels,” my phone flashes. The tingle from my friend’s message so many kilometres up in the sky gives me the tiniest sense of what those 1979 internet pioneers must have felt when they sent the word “Lo” across the world wide web.

As the initial thrill of contact fades, it feels not like my friend and I had cracked a code of the modern era but that we’d broken a secret code.

The inside of a giant metal box in the sky has become an unlikely sacred space. It is oddly one of the few truly disconnected places we have left. Disconnected with the outside world, connected with ourselves, where we are. Yes, sometimes my head gets unintentionally connected with my seat-neighbour’s pungent armpit. But I am present. In the discomfort of that noxious connection.

(While I do know some airlines have had wifi for years, I am, like most Irish people, on the low-budget, short-haul end of the aviation world.)

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Another unlikely sanctuary is the rail line surrounding Seapoint Dart station. For years this Bermuda triangle of mobile phone signal would make me audibly gasp in frustration, as I’d hear the “beep, beep, beep” of my cut-off phone call or see “no internet connection” cross my screen over and over in the middle of adding Weetabix to my online supermarket order.

Smartphones make the harried and frazzled life of a full-time working parent just-about possible. Fifteen years ago I’d have had to give my whole Saturday morning over to the weekly shop instead of simply adding milk and butter to my virtual basket on my journey to work. Or I’d have to stay in the office late instead of answering urgent emails at my kitchen table while discussing river erosion over a fourth class geography book.

But mobile phones also leave us with few silent retreats. There are almost no gaps for the thoughts to creep in, to give us perspective.

You could describe the five-minute journey between Salthill and Blackrock Dart stations, catching glimpses of the daily colour-changes of Dublin Bay, as unproductive. But it is in these slivers that there is room to stop and listen and hear what is inside. Whether it is good or bad. Joyful or painful.

We are surrounded by ways to pull us out of our inner life. This always-on world is reliably at hand to offer us a distraction. And distraction is a broad church. From “being productive” in buying gifts, or proofreading a report on your phone before a deadline, to aimlessly watching videos we don’t even control, engrossed by the TikTok Chicken Dance challenge ... scroll, scroll, scrolling the algorithm.

[ Pro tips from ancient thinkers: why are people in their teens and twenties suddenly so obsessed by the Stoics? ]

If there is pain or grief to be felt or deep thinking to be had, there is the soothing flicker of the screen to help us keep it light, keep it in the shallow, to numb us. Emptiness lets things rise to the top. It lets reflection catch you unawares.

I pass a familiar-looking house and feel a jolt inside. I don’t reach for my phone. I remember my recently-passed vibrant sister. I hear her lovely laugh and smile. I feel her warm welcome. I know I’ve an emptiness at missing her. But most importantly I feel this.

Swimming also brings me to this reposeful place. For 30 minutes there is just me and my strokes and the water. Surprising ideas enter my head, as if randomly out of nowhere. But I wonder were they just in a queue, waiting for some room to bubble up.

Going back to my locker at the pool always brings the same tightness in my chest. I pick up my phone with a twitch. What have I missed? Are my kids okay? The screen almost always tells the same story. At most there’s some breaking news push alert on a new twist in the big story of the day from one of the dozen news sites I’ve signed up to for work. My relief and disappointment are simultaneous.

I am sharply aware of the irony of me writing on this topic. For disturbing the silence is my job. Daily I send Irish Times news notifications to people’s phones. I try to make enticing social media posts and catchy headlines, to pull readers out of their worlds, away from their own thoughts. Distracted by the dopamine hit of a breaking story.

[ Dermot Whelan: ‘Mindfulness isn’t a cult. We don’t have to get naked and cover ourselves in hummus’ ]

But this merely reflects the hyperconnected world we all occupy. In so many ways the phone in my pocket gives me power, productivity, flexibility, in my attempt to “have it all”.

So today I speak for making a little room for peace and silence. Let’s never fix the signal gap at Seapoint Dart station. And Ryanair and Aer Lingus, don’t even think about giving us wifi on board our short-haul flights.