Distraction Therapy: After the Noise

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The second part of this week’s Distraction Therapy mix continues where the first left off—not by repeating a mood, but by sitting with what lingers after reflection. There’s a quiet edge to this one, a drift between tones and textures that doesn’t resolve but instead suggests something waiting to be understood.

In recent weeks, we’ve been thinking about Aristotle’s account of virtue—not as a rigid framework, but as a living practice shaped by habit, intention, and context. His ethics offer a way of orienting ourselves in relation to others, grounded not in rules but in a process of becoming. What strikes me now, listening back to this mix, is how this ancient concern with character and conduct might be finding a strange resonance in the midst of today’s media culture.

We’re living through a time of collapse and overload. Information arrives in torrents, narratives compete without conclusion, and much of what we encounter online is filtered through simulations of intimacy or conviction. The result isn’t clarity, but a fragmentation of self. We see versions of ourselves, fragmented across platforms, shaped as much by response metrics as by thought or care. Attention becomes a currency, but one spent faster than it’s earned.

And yet something is beginning to shift. Beneath the noise and spectacle, there are signs that people are turning back toward older questions—not to retrieve the past, but to find what might still guide us through the confusion. Aristotle’s ethics, when read through a metamodern lens, don’t tell us what to believe. They ask us how we might live when certainty is no longer available, and when sincerity is often mistaken for naïveté.

Metamodernism, with its openness to paradox and its oscillation between irony and sincerity, invites us to consider the possibility that virtue is not fixed, but emergent. That character is not a mask we wear, but something shaped through repeated choices across disjointed contexts. In a time when we are encouraged to perform identity, what might it mean to practise it instead—with attention, humility, and care?

This mix isn’t an answer to that question. It’s more like a companion. Something to carry with you while thinking through what kind of ethical orientation might still be possible, even desirable, in an environment shaped by simulation and fatigue. Perhaps the return to virtue isn’t nostalgic. Perhaps it’s necessary—not as a return to tradition, but as a slow reconstruction of meaning, piece by piece, sound by sound.

There’s nothing tidy here. Just fragments, moods, half-thoughts and lingering tones. But maybe in that unfinishedness, something worthwhile remains. A question, perhaps, about how we act when no one is watching, or when we are being watched too much. About how we hold ourselves together when the culture around us seems designed to pull us apart.

You can listen to the second part of the mix now. Let it sit with you. Let it drift. Then, perhaps, ask not who you want to be seen as—but who you are becoming in the quiet, in the gaps, in the listening.