Broden Johnson hasn’t heard what you’re talking about.
The latest news? Hasn’t read it. The newest podcast? That totally awesome yet completely recycled new murder mystery show? Hasn’t seen it.
For the Australian marketing-agency-founder-turned-author is focused on silence. On the breath we take after a train leaves its platform, on the silent look of desire as we watch it fade, closer and closer, into our memories. On the nothingness we’ve all confronted.
Johnson’s upcoming debut book, Don’t Be A Dick, however, is not silent. Part-memoir, part-philosophical meditation, it begins in the same place most noise does — with us. With our endless justifications, our tiny acts of ego disguised as necessity, the collisions of good intent and poor execution that define the modern self.
Silence, for Johnson, is not the absence of noise but the moment noise begins to think. It’s the edge between restraint and revelation, that small, trembling space where intention hasn’t yet become language. It drags everything toward it — ego, ambition, fear — until what remains is only weight and gravity.
It’s a fitting paradox: a book about restraint written by someone who has spent a career in persuasion. A meditation born from the noise of marketing, and a kind of moral clarity carved out from its chaos.
Decency does not need to be polished, to be performative, to be the thing we keep in our scrapbook as an achievement, Johnson says.
It needs to be messy.
It needs to be gentle. It needs to be rooted in self-awareness, in the willingness to ask who benefits from our words, and who is left to carry them.
There is no catharsis in that.