You Can’t Hear With the Volume at 11.
Finding God’s presence in a world that never quiets down.
In high school, one of my favorite comedians was Brian Regan. In his comedy special, I Walked on the Moon, he riffs on the absurdity of being too busy for eye exams.[1] When he got new contacts, for the first time in six years, he realized just how much he needed a new eye prescription. He had been putting off his eye exam because he was too busy to go.
It’s funny because it’s true: so many of us postpone an eye exam, not because we don’t need it, but because we “don’t have time.” And yet, what’s more important than being able to see clearly?
This is not just about the eye exams. It seems we don’t have time for almost anything these days because we are simply too busy, jumping from one thing to the next.
We keep the busyness train going because we are rewarded for it, for moving from one thing to the next. We wear it like a badge of honor.
How are you?
I am good, but I am soooo busy?
What is keeping you busy these days?
Oh, you know...life.
We don’t even know what we’re busy with, but we’re definitely busy. We can’t stop, and we won’t stop, because we need to be busy.
Busyness holds our self-worth. We equate being busy with meaning and purpose. However, this often leads to neglecting our own self-care and relationships with others.[2]
Sometimes we stay busy to avoid difficult or negative emotions. It is a way to side-step pain about potential stressful experiences.[3]
Our constant desire to busy ourselves is killing us. We need to take off the badge of busyness and throw it away.
I recently read Reconnected: How 7 Screen-Free Weeks with Monks and Amish Farmers Helped Me Recover the Lost Art of Being Human by Carlos Whittaker.
He opens by sharing that through the screen-time reports that iPhones send us each week, he was spending 7 hours and 23 minutes a day on his phone. Quick math tells us that comes out to 49 hours a week, 196 hours a month, and 2353 hours a year—a little less than 100 days a year… on our phones. And then he said, “Sometimes it seems like God is silent today, but maybe it’s just that the volume of life has been so loud lately.”[4]
Said another way, we are too busy to hear, see, and experience God.
But how do we turn down the volume?
For some of us, we fast from screens in the evening. We even take 40 days during the season of Lent and give up social media.
However, we eventually turn the volume back up, and it returns to “normal.” Sometimes it gets even louder.
We find it difficult to turn down the volume because we have lost the ability to simply be—to pause—to have moments of nothingness.
100 years ago, the average American spent 90 minutes at the dinner table. Today, that time has shrunk to just 12 minutes.[5] During the pandemic, family meal times rose by 20%—a shift largely driven by the simple fact that we had nowhere else to go..[6]
In other words, we stopped the busyness.
We are not defined by our productivity, and it is this productivity, or at least the illusion of it, that leads us to miss what God is doing in our midst.
When we ask, Where is not God? Maybe it is not that God has left, but that we have turned the volume up to 11.
As I write this, I am listening to my headphones, because they drown out the noise of my two sons watching TV and the Roomba cleaning the house. However, my wife was also calling my name for 5 minutes, but I couldn’t hear her.
God is calling us, but we have our busyness headphones in and they are turned up to 11. Let’s take out the headphones so we can recommit to communing with God. When we turn down the volume, we re-experience the movement of the Spirit of God around us. Let’s lay aside our headphones and the need to busy ourselves and instead join God in co-creating goodness, love, and hope.
Photo by Alex Gruber on Unsplash
[1] Brian Regan: I Walked on the Moon, directed by Troy Miller (New York: Comedy Central, 2004), DVD.
[2] Elizabeth Scott, “How the Glorification of Busyness Impacts Our Well-Being,” Verywell Mind, last modified August 29, 2023, https://www.verywellmind.com/how-the-glorification-of-busyness-impacts-our-well-being-4175360.
[3] “Feeling Overwhelmed: How the Glorification of Busy Is Harming Our Mental Health,” Network of Care, accessed June 19, 2025, https://mentalhealth.networkofcare.org/worcester-md/CommunityResources/News/Article?articleId=109704.
[4] Carlos Whittaker, Reconnected: How 7 Screen-Free Weeks with Monks and Amish Farmers Helped Me Recover the Lost Art of Being Human (Nelson Books, 2024), xiii.
[5] Ibid, 151.
[6] Ibid, 154.