I haven’t stopped writing in 16 months.
You keep telling me the same thing.
I can’t keep up with you. Are you okay? When do you sleep?
You’re right. Next week, I’m stopping. Recalibrating. The pace that built the shelf is not the pace that hears what the shelf is trying to say.
I want you to stop with me.
The Playbook
Cameron calls it reading deprivation. One full week without input. No books. No news. No feeds. No scrolling. No podcasts. No videos. No other creators’ voices in your head.
She says most artists panic within 48 hours. Because they realize how much of what they call their creative life is actually consumption disguised as work. The research tabs that lead to more tabs. The article that leads to a thread. The thread that leads to a rabbit hole that eats an afternoon (or a night) and produces nothing except the feeling of having been productive.
I know this feeling so well. I live in it. I’m an obsessive, pattern-matching machine and the internet is an all-you-can-eat buffet. I never leave the table.
The fast is not about discipline. It’s about hearing what’s underneath all the noise. Your own voice. The one that’s been trying to talk to you for weeks but can’t get a word in because you’re too busy reading, watching, reacting to what everyone else thinks.
The Room
Pascal wrote it in 1670…
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
He wasn’t talking about staring into our phones. He wasn’t talking about X, Rumble, Telegram, or the 24-hour news cycle. He was talking about the reflex itself. The one that makes you reach for input before you’ve finished processing the last input. The one that fills silence the way water fills a crack.
Thoreau went to Walden and the first thing he noticed wasn’t the beauty. It was how loud his own mind was without the village to drown it out. He’d spent years thinking the noise was external. Turns out most of it was his.
Merton entered the monastery at 26. He expected peace. He got the opposite. He spent the first year horrified by what surfaced when the noise stopped. Every petty vanity. Every unfinished grief. Every lie he’d been telling himself that daily life had been kind enough to let him ignore. He wrote later that the silence didn’t bring him closer to God. It brought him closer to himself. And that was the harder meeting.
They retreated because they needed to hear something true, and the static of other people’s voices had made that impossible.
What Surfaces
The silence isn’t peaceful. Not at first. Cameron warns about this.
The first two days feel like withdrawal because they ARE withdrawal. You’ve been medicating with never-ending input. Information is the drug of the person who thinks they’re too smart to have a drug. When you cut it off, what surfaces isn’t calm. It’s everything you’ve been consuming to avoid feeling.
The argument you never finished. The question you keep circling in your Pages but won’t write through. The thing your body has been telling you that you’ve been too busy to hear. The dream you buried under productivity because productivity feels safer than desire.
This is why most people quit the fast by Tuesday. Not because they miss the news. Because they don’t want to sit with what the news was covering up.
The Wilderness
Jesus withdrew before every major moment.
Before calling the 12. Before the feeding. Before the cross. He went to the mountain or the garden or the far side of the lake, alone, before dawn, and sat in the silence until the Father’s voice was the only voice in the room.
Clarity requires emptiness. You cannot hear the still small voice over the noise of the crowd. Even a good crowd. Even your own crowd.
Elijah heard the voice after the earthquake, the fire, and the wind had passed. The voice came in the silence afterward.
Real Talk! I Am Not Looking Forward to This
I waffled on whether to write this section. I almost skipped it because it doesn’t sound like the version of me that shows up here every week with the plan and the lineage and the exercise.
But I’m committed to the process. And the truth is this is going to be hard for me. Harder than writing. Harder than editing. I process the world by consuming and synthesizing it. I read to think. I research to write. I scroll to pattern-match. Asking me not to consume information for a week is like asking a chef not to taste anything. The whole operation runs on input.
I’m doing it anyway. Because I’m curious what ideas get born when there’s finally room for them. What visions surface when I stop filling every silence with someone else’s signal. The Pages have been circling something for weeks that I keep writing around. I think the fast is how I finally write through it.
The Rules
Here is what I’m doing this week. You’re welcome to do it with me.
1. No reading.
No news, no feeds, no books, no articles, no threads. If you need to read something for work or for your kids, fine. But the recreational consumption stops. The autopilot checking and scrolling stops.
2. No passive input.
No podcasts. No Rumble or YouTube or Tiktok. No background noise that feels like company but is actually someone else’s voice replacing yours.
3. Write your Pages every morning.
That stays. That is you talking to you. The one channel that remains open.
If you need to post something, post it quick and close the tab. Don’t check replies. Don’t check likes. Don’t check the numbers. Put it out and walk away.
The Assignment
Two things to do while the noise is off.
A. The Sanctuary
Make a small physical space just for you and the silence. Not a craft room. Not a prayer corner you’ll feel guilty about not using. A spot where you can sit and hear yourself.
Find a chair by a window. A cushion on the floor. Anywhere. Add three things:
Something beautiful. A flower from the yard. A stone you picked up on a walk. A photograph you haven’t looked at in years.
Something true. A candle. A verse you don’t need to interpret. A small object that holds meaning for you and nobody else.
Something that grants permission. A note you write yourself that says “it’s okay to be here doing nothing.”
This is a declaration. You are making room to listen.
B. The Letter
Sit in your sanctuary. Pick an age far enough ahead that the person who lives there knows what you can’t yet see. If you’re in your fifties or sixties, that might be eighty. If you’re already eighty, make it ninety-nine.
Distance is the point.
Write a letter from that version of you to the one reading this. What do you wish you'd known? What do you wish you'd fought for? What do you regret not starting? What turned out to be noise?
Write it long. Don't edit. Hold what comes.
This Is the Last Thing
This is the last thing you read from me before the silence.
I’ll be back next week. I’ll tell you what happened. I want to hear what happened to you.
If you’ve been doing the Pages, keep doing them. If you haven’t started, this is the week. The Pages and the silence together will do something neither one can do alone.
If you’ve been carrying something from Week 3, from the Letter in Defense, from the anger you finally let yourself feel, this week is where it settles. The fire came first. Now the silence. That’s the order. Clear the room, then listen.
What are you afraid you’ll hear when the noise stops?
I love you.
<3 EKO
If Morning Work is landing for you, three ways to keep the signal going:
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You got this.
I love you.
I have been in this state for 2yrs now through grieving. It naturally takes you to a place with the
least chaos/noise. The nervous system can't tolerate it. It is the blessing of grief. Sitting in it, seeing
everything you have blocked or turned an eye away from. Truths about all that is, come to the surface and cannot be ignored any longer. Truths about the people in your life also, about yourself.
It must be cleared to allow for what comes next. I am curious to see how this goes for you. It is not easy my friend.
Sit in it, feel it, let go.
The best thing that ever happened to me was having my X account permanently disabled for not following the "rules". I think it must have been hacked? I am a 69 year old lady with not so much as a traffic ticket in my life. I don't have tv. The last few months of the news that I can find online was so disturbing, I stopped watching and reading it. I walk my dogs many times a day. I meditate and knit..do my chores and am at peace. I live in a tiny town in Idaho..blissfully removed from the chaos.