The Peace the World Doesn't Know
My grandfather grew up in a world without phones. My father, when he came of age, proposed to install a landline in the house. My grandfather’s instinctive response was, “Why? Who would want to be at the mercy of a perfect stranger’s whims?” He could not imagine himself opening his home to the intrusive rings of strangers. He eventually agreed reluctantly to have the device installed in his home, on condition that he would never have to answer the phone himself.
Since hearing this story, I have often reflected on how shocking our digitised world would be to someone like my grandfather - God rest his soul. If the ringing of a phone appeared intrusive and distracting to this gentleman, I assume the idea of an entire population living at the beck and call of a mobile device full of images and voices and stories and advertisements would strike him as a permanent intrusion into the “inner chamber” of people’s minds and hearts.
Yet a large chunk of the population is effectively “plugged in” to their mobile devices, either literally via earplugs, or figuratively, via an attitude of expectant attention, awaiting the next piece of news or the next streaming content or the next item in their inbox. The existence of “smart” phones mean that unless we go up the Himalayas or go down into a remote basement, our waking hours may, potentially, be filled with incessant communication - very often, passive rather than active - with a world of messages and entertainment that never sleeps.
While it is true that the birth of digital media and online communication changes the character of our distractions, the ceaseless quest for diversion and distraction is nothing new. For example, Blaise Pascal, 17th-century French mathematician and philosopher, offered a reflection in his treatise, Pensées, that demonstrates that restlessness and perpetual distraction are by no means the preserve of a digital era:
When I have sometimes set myself to consider the various agitations of men, and the dangers and hardships to which they expose themselves at Court, in war, from which arise so many quarrels, passions, bold and often wicked enterprises, etc., I have often said that all the unhappiness of men comes from one single thing: not knowing how to remain quietly at rest in a room.
Restlessness and distraction can become a way of life, even for people who are immersed in a faith tradition. When TV series, email-checking, social media browsing, financial investment, or frenetic work schedules take over our lives, we can grow so accustomed to the endless noise that prolonged silence and simple companionship become boring or even intolerable to us.
When Spain was enveloped in a massive nation-wide data outage on 28th April 2025, millions of citizens were completely cut off from any form of digital communication for several hours. I drove around my city, Pamplona, in search of a phone signal, to get some news about what was actually going on, to no avail.
When I got home from my fruitless quest, my wife was quietly reading a book. We had no access to internet, social media, or Netflix movies. A strange quiet had engulfed our lives. But it wasn’t actually a bad thing to have our phones knocked out for a few hours. It was a stark reminder that we had forgotten how to live entirely offline, sitting with the quiet of our own thoughts or lost in a book.
Perhaps Pascal was exaggerating a little when he said that “all the world’s problems” derive from our inability to “remain quietly at rest in a room.” But it is surely the case that there is a form of inner peace, happiness, and serenity that is only possible for people who frequently take time out from the frenzy of economic consumption, social media scrolling, and TV entertainment, to be still with their own thoughts, or to spend time in quiet conversation with the people they care about.
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My academic profile and publications are listed at my website, davidthunder.com.