Issue #28 — The Signal in the Static
My younger brother John is my Irish twin. Eleven months behind me, which means we shared a bedroom, two schools, and approximately zero taste in music. (Actually, in almost anything, but especially in music.)
He listened to late-90s alternative metal. Loud. Hard. Fast.
To him, it was music. To me, it was noise. And vice versa. Somehow he wasn't a fan of Boyz II Men or Frank Sinatra.
Same sound waves. Same speakers. Two completely different experiences.
That's how noise actually works. It's not a decibel level. It's not objective.
Noise is anything that demands your attention without your permission.
I had a simple solution growing up: avoidance. My brother moved into the basement, we hung out with different crowds, and eventually went to different schools (though the colleges were only 20 minutes apart...almost close enough to hear System of a Down blasting from his dorm room).
The challenge today is how much harder avoidance has become.
The world does whatever it wants. At whatever volume it wants. At every level.
At the physical level, researchers at the University of Michigan and Harvard separately confirmed: more than 100 million Americans, roughly one in three of us, live with daily environmental noise loud enough to raise our blood pressure, raise our stress hormones, and erode our focus. Traffic. Construction. Subway platforms. Open offices. That guy on the conference call who won't mute or use headphones. (Please don't be that guy.)
And it doesn't stop at the digital level.
The Slack ping. The breaking news banner. The LinkedIn doom post. The AI summary of the AI summary. The dashboard that updates whether or not we asked it to. The seventeen wellness influencers telling us we're sleeping wrong, eating wrong, breathing wrong, and somehow pooping wrong. Can't even get that right.
It plays. It scrolls. It permeates.
We listen. We watch. We absorb.
Not even realizing that we're listening. And with no basement in which to banish the offenders.
Underneath it all, like an annoying bass line you can't quite turn off, is a low, steady hum of stress.
Most of us treat this like a personal failing. It isn't. (It’s not even a late-90s alternative metal failing.)
It's a design problem. And like any design problem, it has a solution.
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🧠 The Noise Isn’t New. But the Volume Is.
Before we explore the solution, let’s better define what we’re actually fighting. Noise comes in three (not so delicious) flavors. We're getting smothered by all three at once, and most of us don't separate them, which is part of why none of us feel like we're winning the fight.
Layer 1: Personal noise. The part of the internet that has decided you, specifically, need to be optimized. Eat better. Sleep better. Lift heavier. Cold plunge. Mouth-tape. Journal. Meditate. Walk 10,000 steps. Walk 12,000 steps. Walk barefoot. Walk backwards. All while listening to a podcast hosted by a shirtless billionaire discussing mitochondrial optimization.
Most of it isn't for you — in your actual life — with your actual constraints. It's content optimized for clicks, not for outcomes. And when you absorb fifty different versions of "you should X" every week, you don't get better. You get tired.
Layer 2: Professional noise. Will AI take your job? Will the layoffs reach your team? Should you be reskilling? Upskilling? Pivoting? Personal-branding harder? Lateral-moving? Every single piece of content in your feed has an answer. None of them know you.
Most of them are written to make you anxious enough to click a second one. There's a reason "the future of work" is the highest-engagement topic on LinkedIn — fear scales beautifully.
Layer 3: Macro noise. Geopolitics. Markets. The election. The other election. The crisis that was on fire last Tuesday and has been replaced by a new crisis this Tuesday.
Most of it is real. Almost none of it requires anything from you in the next 24 hours. But the news cycle is engineered so that consuming worry feels like doing something. It isn't. It's anxiety theater with better production values. (Except hantavirus. You should definitely worry needlessly about hantavirus.)
Each layer is loud on its own. Stacked, they're deafening. Pushed into an endless feed via the world's best distraction device, they're absolutely overwhelming.
If the cost was just stress, it would be bad enough. But there's more at stake.
It's judgment. It's prioritization. It's perspective.
It's flat-out harder to make a clear call when there are twenty voices in your head, and not one of them is yours.
In 1971 — fifty-five years ago, before the internet, before the smartphone, before the first dashboard refreshed itself — a Nobel laureate named Herbert Simon stood up at Johns Hopkins and shared this warning.
"A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."
He was right then. He's more right now.
What Simon understood before anyone, and what most of us still haven't internalized, is that attention isn't a resource like time or money.
It's the only currency that actually matters.
And here's where noise fits in: It's a tax.
Every alert, banner, and feed exists for one reason: to extract your attention without your consent. And the modern economy runs on that extraction.
The reason most of what you consume is "free" is because you're not the customer. You're the inventory. Free content isn't a gift. It's the most efficient way ever invented to make withdrawals from an account you didn't know you had.
This year, the Atlantic's Megan Garber published a book called Screen People that lands in the same place Simon did, fifty-five years later. We've turned each other into characters in a never-ending show. We perform for audiences we can't see. We consume worry like it's information. We mistake the noise for music because we forgot what music sounded like.
Same warning. Different decade.
Bottom line: Attention used to be a discipline. Now it's a security perimeter. Which means you are losing a fight you didn't even know you were in.
What Quiet Actually Looks Like
The people I watch quietly outperform their peers aren't smarter. They're not grinding harder. They're not optimizing their morning routine. Though they are all fans of chia seeds for some reason.
Also, they've figured out that their attention is the only real resource they have and that the world is competing for it harder than their actual job is. (Sorry, actual job. I know you are trying your best.)
Three things change when you start owning your attention like the investment asset it is:
You stop trying to keep up. Keeping up is a losing game by design. There will always be more information than you can absorb, more frameworks than you can apply, more newsletters you can read (obviously, this one is hyper-critical). The individuals who are calm under pressure aren't more informed than you. They've decided, on purpose, to be less informed about things that don't change what they do.
You start auditing your inputs the way you'd audit a budget. Most of us track what we eat, what we spend, and what we do at the gym. (For me, that’s too much, way too much, and barely at all). Almost no one tracks what they consume with their attention, even though it's the most valuable thing they own. The first time you actually look at where your attention goes for a week, you'll be embarrassed. Or disturbed. Or both, but that's totally the point.
You learn the difference between awareness and anxiety. A lot of what we call "staying informed" is just absorbing other people's stress. Real awareness is information that changes a decision. Anxiety is information that changes your mood. They feel similar in your body. But they are absolutely not the same thing. The leadership move is learning to tell them apart in real time and acting only on the first one.
So yeah, you could consume less social media, go for more nature walks, meditate in the mornings. All good stuff that you should probably do.
But none of that changes the underlying math.
You're still letting the world spend your attention for you.
The actual work is taking the purse strings back.
🍴 Try a Bite This Week
Three moves. Subtract. Filter. Add.
Kill One Input. Pick one thing you consume out of habit: a newsletter, a podcast, a feed, a Slack channel, an app, a standing meeting that hasn't generated a real decision in six months. Cut it for 14 days. Track what you actually miss. Almost always the answer is: nothing. The signal that mattered would have reached you another way. Most "just-in-case" inputs are unprocessed anxiety with notifications turned on.
Run the 24-Hour Test. Before you scroll, click, or open, ask one question: Will knowing this change anything I actually do in the next 24 hours, the next week, or the next quarter? If the answer is no, you're not informed. You're entertained. There's a difference between awareness and anxiety wearing awareness's coat. Apply this once a day for a week. You'll be unsettled by how often you fail your own test.
Buy One Expensive Signal. This quarter, pick one input that costs you something. Real money. Real time. Real discomfort. A course you have to finish. A coach who's going to be honest with you. A hard conversation with a deadline and a witness. A 1:1 you've been avoiding. Free content is a gas; it expands to fill whatever time you give it. An expensive signal has weight. It changes what you do because you can't pretend it didn't.
💡 A Final Thought
You'll never make the noise stop. The world's volume knob is broken, and nobody's coming to fix it. But you can and should decide what gets through.
And it's allowed to change.
The kid who only cared about sports and pop culture grew up to read about geopolitics and labor markets. (Basically, I have become super lame on purpose.)
Where you make deposits with your currency is allowed to evolve.
What should never change is who owns the account.
Not the algorithm. Not the feed. Not whoever's writing the next breaking-news banner.
You.
So, yeah…these days I actually listen to a few of my younger brother John's old bands. A little less Frank Sinatra. A little more Deftones. The same healthy amount of Boyz II Men.
Questionable choices? Sure. But they are mine.
And yours are yours.
Some of them you already know. Some of them you'll find by accident, in a season of your life you can't see yet. Either way, you're the one paying for them, so spend it on what matters.
Choose your music. Defend your room. Let the rest hum past.
🌶️ Add Your Spice
What's one input you've been consuming out of habit that you already know isn't paying you back, and what's stopped you from cutting it?
Drop it in the comments. Bonus points if naming it makes you a little uncomfortable. (Those are usually the ones it's costing you the most to keep.)
If this landed, send it to someone whose attention you respect…the kind of person who chooses their music carefully. We're all trying to find the signal in the same static.