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When it comes to having fun, I’m with Bertrand Russell.

“A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live,” the philosopher and mathematician said. And anybody who has spent Nyepi — one of Bali’s idyllic days of silence — in the middle of whispering rice fields would never doubt it.

On Nyepi, which fell on March 16 this year, the use of motor vehicles, modern gadgetry, cooking fires and all lighting is banned for 24 hours. A peaceful calm descends over the island as people hole up in their family compounds to contemplate their lives.

Each year, I am fortunate enough to be in Bali on this day. As I sit on our veranda and take in the unadorned world, without all of the cacophonous accoutrements we seem to think it needs, I am hit again with the question: How did we ever get to the point where we thought we could improve on this?

So you might think I’d be all on board with the movement to create an annual Nyepi-like World Silent Day (www.worldsilentday.org) every March 21 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., and I actually did suggest such a thing a few years ago as a sort of quiet man’s fantasy — only I was a bit greedy and wanted full daylong, weekly observances.

But there is something about this serious effort to bring the gospel of Nyepi to a wider world that leaves me cold and skeptical. For one thing, there is just too much competition already for special days and events in the climate awareness niche — Earth Hour on March 27 and Earth Day on April 22, both just around the corner.

Additionally, the Nyepi concept strikes me as something that won’t do well outside of Bali. Removed from the island’s insular communities and traditions, any sort of marking of the day can only be about turning off the lights and staying at home, while the original is only incidentally about that. Nyepi is most fundamentally a day of introspection and getting rid of modern-day distractions is just meant to help.

It’s a big mistake, too, that there is no big party planned first, as on the eve of Nyepi when pots are banged, firecrackers set off and the ogoh-ogoh effigies of demons, spirits and man’s ills are paraded through villages and then burned in great conflagrations.

Bali’s Neypi recognizes that before the great quiet, there has to be some exorcism, otherwise society’s evils will come rushing into the vacuum created by inactivity and chaos will continue to reign.

Big parties are also the best way to get people to celebrate and draw worldwide attention to something. Such carryings-on may seem antithetical to the purposes of creating a secular observance of silence, but you can’t have one without the other.

The calm comes after the storm. The quiet naturally follows because recovery takes time.

Anyway, I had plenty of opportunity to witness whatever cross-cultural appeal this holiday might have this past week, when tourists “flocked” to Bali to see what the island was like in repose. Or at least, I witnessed them last Monday night in Ubud on Nyepi Eve, as the snap-happy captured their holiday pics of the papier-mache ogoh-ogoh pre-burning. And as I walked around with my son, I observed how the Balinese had become mere players in the acting out of their own traditions. The tourists were there to witness a spectacle — not to participate — and not to consider the expulsion of their own demons and failings ahead of their own day of meditation.

And I can’t really think that a stripped-down export version of the day scrubbed of religious significance is going to be any more compelling to people from different traditions, no matter how many tons of carbon emissions a global day of silence might prevent from being released in to the air.

The real telling sign, though, came on the next night, Nyepi, as we looked 30 kilometers to the south across a darkened Bali, to the hotel lights on “the Bukit,” as the island’s unwashed expatriates affectionately call the elevated southern peninsula where many of the more upscale hotels and villas are.

If even here, in the midst of it all, non-Balinese can’t find it in themselves to participate in marking the day as it is meant to be observed, what chance does it have overseas?

Thomas Hogue is a former Jakarta Globe editor.