by Quiet Social Club Founder Iliana

The majority of my life was about noise. It all started at a school concert, hearing another classmate playing the piano. This was the beginning. For the next 15 years, I would train as a concert pianist, and communicate and experience things through sound that went beyond the logic of language.

We often think that music is about the notes on the page. But what 10,000+ hours of playing the piano have taught me is: Sound is not the whole story. Without silence - without the breaks, the pauses, and the little moments of anticipation - many of the most beautiful pieces in music history would be little more than long blurbs of sound. Life outside of the practice room isn’t too different.

Without moments of reflection to connect the dots and give them significance, we are merely consumers, not creators, of our lives.

My mother took me to my first meditation retreat when I was 16. (You can imagine a mother’s relief when her daughter learns meditation during the most tumultuous years of puberty.) But it wasn’t until many years later, when I observed 11 days of silence at a Buddhist monastery in Nepal that I made the connection: like a musical piece without pauses and fermatas, life assumes perspective and clarity through moments of quiet. Without moments of reflection to connect the dots and give them significance, we are merely consumers, not creators, of our lives.

After leaving the piano and concert halls for a career in tech, it was in meditation halls across Asia and Europe that I would recover some of these moments of silence. It would be there that I would find a sanctuary away from an increasingly fast-paced world that can often feel like we’re swimming in an endless stream of information, stimuli, and expectations.

My parents’ friends may be outraged at my saying this, but we Millennials don’t have it easy. We live online. Constantly plugged in, we have crafted online personalities and lives that frequently take place alongside the “real” physical world.

The Journey 

My first silent retreat was hardly a conscious decision; if anything, you could call it a big question mark. I truly didn’t expect to commit to silence, imagining myself secretly singing in the shower. At that time, I had so little faith in myself that I decided to only hand in my Sim card and not the phone itself, thinking that perhaps clutching it at times might be the solution if I were to experience withdrawal symptoms. I need to be honest with you: I was the girl who spent 1 hour thinking about “cool” captions before posting something. 11 days spent with the “real” me sobered me up.

I entered the retreat at an interesting time, working in an industry whose life essence is you spending time online. Although I told myself I was developing digital applications for a humanitarian cause, I was working in an environment that wasn’t truly questioning the impact of its success metrics. At that time, I believed that there was no problem with performance indicators like “stickiness” or “daily sessions per DAU (daily active user)”. It was a world that rewarded you with badges and enticed you to keep up with your social connections at all times of the day — on multiple platforms — presenting a particular version of yourself, even if that didn’t correspond to reality. It was a world that had stopped questioning the fine nuances that are at play between smart technology and smart use of technology. 

I will never forget the final hours of the retreat. Standing there, in the reception area of one of the world’s most renowned monasteries in the Tibetan tradition, returned to me by one of the monks working in administration: a lifeless gadget I had once called “my phone”, which now seemed like nothing more than a cold, heavy piece of metal. The blackened screen reflected the image of a young woman so confident and composed I hardly recognised her. I knew I had just experienced one of the most important weeks of my life.

Welcome to the Club

A beautiful quote by Maxime Lagacé says: “Noise creates illusions. Silence brings truth.” There is a power in silence, in becoming quiet internally and externally that we rarely talk about. Maybe we are afraid of it. But quiet doesn’t need to be 11 days at a monastery. In fact, you are already living many moments of it on a daily basis. It is the times that you put away your phone at family dinner, the times you go for a long walk without your headphones in, the times that you curl up for an afternoon or evening with a new book and a bowl of pasta to regroup. It is all those times where you make time for yourself.

My time in silence helped me reconnect to who I truly was beyond all the “noise”. It helped me develop a more deliberate relationship with the people and things in my life. Silence, whether it was one or 11 days, helped me find my pace and balance in a world that is moving increasingly faster, and develop the confidence and conviction to stick to it.

Quiet Social Club is the embodiment of years of insights, learnings, and experiences. It is a lifestyle, a philosophy lived and propelled forward through the members of its community. It’s time for experiences and products that address the demands of our modern, connected lives on a very practical level, without giving up on the spiritual, more meaningful element. This is the time to remind ourselves and each other that, in the end, it is our shared humanity and the desire to fully experience it in this world that truly connects us. And that we have the ability to live this philosophy every day.

I wish you all the best on your unique journey!

Iliana