Protecting our voice in the age of distraction
What Anne Morrow Lindbergh's quest for simplicity on Florida's Gulf Coast can teach us now.
In the early 1950s, Anne Morrow Lindbergh—writer, pilot, mother of five, and wife to aviator Charles Lindbergh—spent two weeks alone in a small cottage on Florida’s Captiva Island. During this trip she collected shells, cooked simple meals, and began writing what would become Gift from the Sea, a contemplative exploration of the trappings of modernity and the search for simplicity.
She called the life she was living one of “multiplicity,” and described America as being based on the “premise of ever-widening circles of contact and communication.” This includes family demands, social and cultural pressures, newspapers, magazines, radio programs, political drives, and so on.
Consider this description of the demands of a mid-century mother:
“I mean to lead a simple life, to choose a simple shell I can carry easily—like a hermit crab. But I do not. I find that my frame of life does not foster simplicity. My husband and five children must make their way in the world. The life I have chosen as wife and mother entrains a whole caravan of complications. It involves a house in the suburbs and either household drudgery or household help which wavers between scarcity and non-existence for most of us.
It involves food and shelter; meals, planning, marketing, bills, and making the ends meet in a thousand ways. It involves not only the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker but countless other experts to keep my modern house with its modern “simplifications” (electricity, plumbing, refrigerator, gas-stove, oil-burner, dish-washer, radios, car and numerous other labor-saving devices) functioning properly. It involves health; doctors, dentists, appointments, medicine, cod-liver oil, vitamins, trips to the drugstore. It involves education; spiritual, intellectual, physical; schools, school conferences, car-pools, extra trips for basketball or orchestra practice; tutoring; camps, camp equipment and transportation…”
Decades later, her mental list-making is remarkably similar to my own. Today we might recognize this as the mental load—the often invisible labor required to manage a household. The mundane laid bare. The never-ending to-do list. The responsibilities that both keep our lives afloat and also compete for our attention in the midst of creative pursuits.
And she was feeling this way—scattered, tired, conflicted—before the internet. Before pagers pinged us to call the office for an important message, before smartphones became miniature computers that slipped into our pocket, before social media confused who we are with who we portray ourselves to be.
Simply put, she was distracted. And distraction, she argues, is the fundamental adversary to creativity.
“The problem is not merely Woman and Career, Woman and the Home, Woman and Independence. It is more basically: how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life, how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.”
How to remain whole now, in 2025, when forces are constantly pulling us ‘off center,’ is the task set out before us. Since the early days of January, I’ve been experimenting with ways to minimize my own distraction—particularly down the rabbit hole of social media and the news.
It started the week of the inauguration, when I intentionally avoided Instagram, Facebook, and all news sites, a survival strategy during a challenging week.
As a sensitive person, I’ve often struggled with how much news is right for me. So much of it is triggering, and headlines are designed to keep us anxious. How do we stay informed while also staying true to our needs? I’m not the first to grapple with this question or talk about how we are not made for this. That is, our nervous systems are not designed to handle the onslaught of news 24/7, to swing from reading good news to bad news in a matter of seconds.
Despite living in a world devoid of social media, Anne Morrow Lindbergh grappled with similar questions.
“Today a kind of planetal point of view has burst upon mankind. The world is rumbling and erupting in ever-widening circles around us. The tensions, conflicts and sufferings even in the outmost circle touch us all, reverberating in all of us. We cannot avoid these vibrations.
But just how far can we implement this planetal awareness? We are asked today to feel compassionately for everyone in the world; to digest intellectually all the information spread out in public print; and to implement in action every ethical impulse aroused by our hearts and minds. The interrelatedness of the world links us constantly with more people than our hearts can hold. Or rather—for I believe the heart is infinite—modern communication loads us with more problems than the human frame can carry.”
Her answer to contending with this tension? To turn inward.
“When we start at the center of ourselves, we discover something worthwhile extending toward the periphery of the circle. We find again some of the joy in the now, some of the peace in the here…”
Presence. Joy. Contentment.
Finding hope in all the shores that still need to be explored.
All this brings me back to the news, and the experiment of limiting how it’s consumed. My one week hiatus turned into two, and I noticed myself feeling calmer, softer. Less hypervigilant all the time. I wanted more.
Here’s exactly what I’m doing, and intend to keep doing for the foreseeable future.
I subscribed to . Twice a week, this is my main source of news. I don’t read posts first thing in the morning or right before bed, but always during daylight hours, when I’m regulated.
During my son’s karate practice twice a week, I make a couple of calls to my senators using the Five Calls app. I leave a message using the prompts provided and don’t talk to anyone, yet it feels like something truly tangible that makes a difference. When my attorney general recently announced that our state joined a lawsuit against DOGE, he spoke about all the calls he’s received from constituents. Those messages get tallied.
My new relationship to the library is going well. A shorter holds list means that rather than rushing through a stack I feel urgency to read, I’m savoring books at my own pace instead.
I’m losing interest in Instagram. I keep a private account to watch dog videos and reels about musical theatre, and occasionally check my author account on my desktop. I don’t spend a lot of time here, and I mostly don’t miss it.
My son and I have a playlist of approved songs we can both listen to in the car together. A new one he recently added is Born for This by The Score, which is… fine. It’s something I might listen to if I wanted to pump myself up before an intense workout, which isn’t really my thing anymore, but it was playing on the ride home from school last week and one of the lyrics got stuck in my head.
“I will never lose my voice if I cut out all the noise.”
When we consciously minimize distractions and gently experiment, it does the most important thing: remind us who we are. It allows us to think more clearly, hear our own thoughts, and make space for new ideas to arrive.
Let’s cut out the noise and allow our own voice come through.
Let’s open a notebook and close the news tabs on our computer.
Simplification is always an inside job, and it might be one of the most essential tasks we can pursue. It was true in 1955, and it’s true right now.
A great reminder! I reread Gift from the Sea every couple of years — sometimes at the beach and sometimes when it feels far away. It never fails to settle my spirit and help me bring some clarity to my writing and living.
Thank you for this gift! I was talking with someone today about how I love learning about other people from the past who have lived beautiful creative lives, where they have asked the questions & considered their space in the world. This right here is exactly what I love about it!! Off to find the book & purchase it if at all possible.