The Anechoic Hell Chamber™ Theory

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Blaise Pascal, Pensées

This week, I published the Think Like a Director Field Manual on Amazon’s Kindle platform. It was a pretty cool experience for me personally. If you listened to last week’s episode called “I performed all my child’s surgeries all by myself,” you will understand what a personal milestone this was. That episode showed the influence that AI has had on me personally, and how my relationship to it has changed over time.

In the Field Manual, I don’t talk much about AI, and that’s on purpose. But I do have a chapter that deals with a similar topic – social media. I thought it would be fun to share it with you now. And if you enjoy it, I would love it if you would support the launch and my cause by sharing this episode and also heading to Amazon and buying the Field Manual. It’s just fifteen bucks and it would help get the word out. And what is “my cause,” you ask? Well, several years ago I met with a guy named Lon Stroschien who runs something called Normal 40, and he helps people find their “why.” He asked me some very pointed questions, one in particular about identifying what specifically I wanted to share with the world. My answer was pretty nebulous – it was something about helping people understand their own dignity. To really preach the dignity of the human person. It took me a long time to flesh this out, but that’s what Think Like a Director is all about. It’s not easy to take a mission like that and put it into a tangible message. But that’s what I have tried to do. I hope it resonates with you.

So, without further ado, here is an excerpt from the Field Manual. It’s from a chapter called “The Anechoic Hell Chamber™.” I hope you enjoy it!

Excerpt from Think Like a Director – The Field Manual (The Anechoic Hell Chamber chapter):

A few years back, I had a podcast called Five Whole Minutes. It was based on the idea of taking literally five entire minutes of silence. I would give a little prompt to consider and then leave the listener with space to think, with five one-minute periods of literally dead silence. I intentionally created what radio stations call “dead air,” which they consider to be the fastest way to get someone to change the channel. My marketing instincts are admittedly nonexistent.

I had about ten episodes or so. The first few did OK with engagement, but then it trailed off. I couldn’t figure out why, until I was doing some research and came across something called an anechoic chamber.

If you aren’t familiar with the term, an anechoic chamber is about as close as you can get to near total silence. It’s a special room that uses sound absorbing panels and engineered construction to block out and absorb sound. There’s one called Orfield Labs in Minneapolis that claims to be the quietest place on earth. It’s said that you can’t be in there for more than forty-five minutes without driving yourself nuts. This is because the only sound you hear in there is… you. And apparently, you become disoriented when there is nothing but yourself to listen to.

I can’t claim firsthand knowledge of this but I do have tinnitus, and I imagine it follows the same principle. My tinnitus sounds like a high pitched ringing in my ears (the left one especially) and the quieter my surroundings get, the louder the ringing in my ears becomes. There have been a few nights when I have been nearly driven to madness because of this. I always thought those late night TV commercials trying to pitch tinnitus remedies were BS until it happened to me. Once it did, I remember thinking I would pay anything to get rid of it. That is, until I looked into it and they wanted six thousand dollars for special hearing aids to fix it. I didn’t have six thousand dollars so I convinced myself I could put up with the maddening insanity of “sitting quietly in a room alone” (to paraphrase Pascal).

Great, now what? Well, I did learn something at the hearing aid place. They gave me a bunch of hearing tests and found out exactly what frequencies I struggled to hear the most. Then they tuned the hearing aids to amplify only the missing frequencies. Once I put those hearing aids on, the ringing disappeared instantaneously. It was magical. The doctor told me it was because my brain knew those frequencies were missing so it tried to fill them in with that infuriating ringtone called tinnitus. So my brain basically yearned to hear what it was designed to hear. It wanted to be tuned into the right things and it knew it was missing out.

Now I can empathize with the Anechoic Chamber Madness Theory. I am staying as far away from total silence as I can get. It will take what I know I am missing and amplify it louder and LOuder and LOUDer and LOUDER until I just can’t take it anymore. I imagine this is what hell is like. And I suspect Pascal knew it too. I wonder if he had tinnitus.

This is why you hate yourself for getting drawn back into the trap that social media created for you. It’s not because it’s an echo chamber. It’s because it’s an anechoic chamber. The algorithms are not just holding a mirror up to you, oh no. That’s not diabolical enough. They are doing something far worse. They are forcing you to listen to your own heartbeat.

Your own heartbeat isn’t a bad thing. But if it’s isolated and set on repeat and amplified, it’s your Own Personal Algorithmic Anechoic Hell Chamber. Social media has figured out a way to scale Hell and make it seem unique to you. See? Diabolical.

But it didn’t start out that way. Almost all social media platforms started with your actual friends, didn’t they? You took what was fantastic in real life – which is community and friendship and connection. That’s the frequency your soul is yearning to be receptive to hearing. And it worked, because that stuff was actually there. But those things are free and can’t be monetized. So the algorithm tries to mimic that frequency. But it can’t. In the process of mimicking it, the true community and friendship and connections drop out and are replaced with an infuriating ringing sound that keeps you awake and drives you to madness. Your personalized algorithm pushes you further and further into anechoic isolation.

The good news is that there is an entire world outside of the anechoic chamber, full of the right kind of silence. All you have to do is open the door and walk out into the sunlight.

Silence isn’t the lack of all sound. It’s the fullness of it. It’s birds, wind, and raindrops. It’s footsteps and clinking glasses and sobbing and laughing. It’s all of the frequencies your brain and your soul and your eyes and your fingers can experience.

It’s a gift. A gift that grounds you in time and place and humanity.

Peace to you,

Max