Silence In A World Of Noise

Technology made our lives more interesting. Now it’s drowning us in an awful din.

- Pico Iyer

FOUR YEARS AGO, an editor of mine at The New York Times came to me and said, “You live your whole life in airports and you just never stop moving. Have you ever thought of sitting still?” I had not, of course. And to encourage me in this, she gave me a small book. I read the book and now I am obliged to talk about a subject I know next to nothing about. But one thing I do know is that everybody in this room is busy*. We are being bombarded by so much information, misinformation, disinformation every day, the world is coming to us as a never-ending series of shocks.