In Thoughts in Solitude, Thomas Merton writes:

In our age everything has to be a “problem.” Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.

Merton wrote these words in the 1950s. If they were true then, they are only truer now. We tend to work up ourselves about this and that, and now we have platforms to make our internal anxieties publicly and widely known with little personal consequence. Everything has to be a problem and our job is to analyze the snot out of it and “figure it out” — or at least point it out. This seems to be a symptom of post-modernity. All our analysis paralysis is real and usually results in only more anxiety.

When I was writing on Substack, I noticed that all my posts about push–button issues and hot topics all “performed better,” meaning they got more clicks. But, I do wonder if they really performed better or if they were just better at fueling my readers’ anxiety. I also noticed that nearly every article that showed up on my Substack feed, almost all of them were anxiety-inducing, critical analyses of this, that, and the other thing.

Let’s return to Merton:

Sanctity in such an age means, no doubt, traveling from the area of anxiety to the area in which there is no anxiety or perhaps it may mean learning, from God, to be without anxiety in the midst of anxiety.

Fundamentally, as Max Picard points out, it probably comes to to this: living in a silence which so reconciles the contradictions within us that, although they remain within us, they cease to be a problem.

Here, I think Merton strikes gold. The ease with which social media and mass media allows one to speedily express him or herself — it allows one to get his or her interior noise and chaos “out there.” But “everyone” expressing his or her anxiety “out there” results in a kind of widespread and heightened anxiety. Noise and more noise and little silence. Yet silence is the answer. This harkens back to Pascal’s claim in his Pensées, “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”

Merton continues:

Contradictions have always existed in the soul of man. But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.

Silence, then, belongs to the substance of sanctity. In silence and hope are formed the strength of the Saints.

Contradictions have always existed and will always exist, but they need not all become anxiety inducing “problems” which are then made public. Anxiety fuels anxiety. But silence and hope — entrusting to God the good of my future, our future, in prayer — these are the real antidotes to today’s problems that flood screens, and consequently our minds and our hearts.