Try, just for a moment, to remember the last image you looked at. Maybe it was an ad on a website, or maybe it was a meme you scrolled by on your phone. Can you recall it? 

Neither can I. And that’s why I’ve started to actively aim for signal and slay the noise.

Signal, of course, is the good stuff. It’s the content we want; the stuff we start out looking for before we fall down a rabbit hole.

Noise, in comparison, is the stuff that interferes with the signal. It’s all the stuff that gets in the way, either blocking the signal completely or distracting us enough that we forget what we're doing. (Signal-to-noise is a technical term, but the metaphor works well in the deluge of our digital world.)

And keeping our aim on the signal is getting harder to do. We start out streaming a series and end up surfing social media, missing half the episode. Or compulsively check our email as soon as we start to read an article.

Is that a problem? Yes, because ever-more research shows that it degrades our very ability to think. 

Nicholas Carr summed it up well in his classic book The Shallows. He wrote that “the Net’s cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively. Our brains turn into simple signal-processing units, quickly shepherding information into consciousness and then back out again.”

No wonder we can’t remember any of the words or images that skimmed by us five minutes ago, never mind last week.

So I’ve made a game out of hunting for signal. Before I pick up my phone or click the next random YouTube thumbnail, I ask myself the question: is this signal or noise? Do I really want this, or will it take time away from things and people I actually enjoy—things I wish I had more time for?

Nine times out of ten, it’s nothing more than noise—digital static that it feels surprisingly good to ignore.

These days, armed with my imaginary bow and arrow, I’m aiming for signal and slaying the noise.

Photo by Norbert Braun on Unsplash