Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.

We forgot how to be quiet

There's something disorienting about how normal constant noise has become. We fill every gap—commutes, meals, workouts, even waiting in line—with podcasts, music, notifications. The silence that once just happened now feels like something we have to defend or schedule. It's easy to dismiss this as mere comfort, but Arp is pointing at something deeper: when we're never alone with our thoughts, we stop having the kind of thinking that actually clarifies who we are or what matters.

The strangest part is how silence has become something we need to be convinced to want. Most people know the feeling of putting the phone down and feeling restless at first—almost panicked. That resistance itself is telling. We've outsourced contemplation to external stimulation, trading the discomfort of reflection for the comfort of distraction. Yet the people who actually prioritize silence—who sit with boredom, take walks without earbuds, let their mind wander—often describe feeling more like themselves afterward, not less.

The irony is that silence doesn't require rejecting modern life. It just requires occasionally opting out. Not as deprivation, but as the opposite: as a return to a basic human capacity we've accidentally abandoned.