Squeeze in a Little Quiet

Some days, you just want the world to shut up. You overhear somebody talking about some dumb sporting event, or a dumb new movie, or you hear the phrase, “Some ‘Guy Fieri’ sort of thing,” and you think: Okay, that’s enough of that. It’s not even the noise that’s the problem — it’s all the rubbish that people say that’s the problem.

But it’s an atavistic response, isn’t it? We fill the world with noise, and we’re suspicious of those who complain about it. A respect for monkish quietude is, at best, considered naive, and at worst, looked upon as a malicious attack against our beloved right to express ourselves. And we love nothing better than to run our mouths, don’t we? “You can’t tell me not to speak! FREEDOM OF SPEECH! FREEDOM OF SPEEEEEEECH!”

This is why you can’t really talk about these things; it makes people angry and defensive. And they have a point, of course. We really don’t have the right to insist that others (including the giant media conglomerates and advertisers) pipe down for a second. Even though lord knows we could all use a break every now and again, the only ethical way to get one is to extract ourselves from the clamoring stream of nonsense.

For many of us, this happens shortly before bedtime. We shut down our gadgets and crawl into bed, and pray our partners can keep their traps shut long enough for us to fall into a fitful slumber. Or, we crack a book — which is not silent, but is certainly the most quiet form of media consumption. And then our neighbors decide that midnight is really the best time to start the local dubstep festival in their apartment, and it’s all ruined. (“You can’t tell me not to play Skrillex at one in the morning! FREEDOM OF SPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECCCCHHHHHHHHHHUH!!!!”)

Unfortunately, most of us don’t own property out in the countryside. (“Not that unfortunate,” say the current landowners.) We could travel off the grid, but we’ll just wind up at a rented location that’ll cost us an arm and a leg to visit. It’ll probably be overcrowded, too. You curl up on the floor of the high desert for a nice, quiet nap, and the next thing you know you wake up in the middle of somebody’s orgy tent.

All that’s really left is to try to find and savor whatever quiet moments that you can amidst the hurly-burly of normal life. I, for example, managed to find a pair of noise cancelling earbuds for mere five bucks at the grocery store. I wear them on the train to keep the noise down — I don’t even plug them into anything. (They sound terrible anyway.) To me, they’re nothing more than a pair of socially acceptable earplugs. Regular earplugs would piss people off. (“What’s the matter? You think you’re too good for my constant shouting? FRREEEEEEEEDOOOOOOM OOOFFF SPEEEEEEEE — and so on.”) Noise-cancelling earbuds work pretty much the same as earplugs, but onlookers are allowed to assume that you’re cramming even more noise in your brains, which is just dandy. In fact, it makes them so happy that they’ll cheerfully yell into their phones even louder in celebration.

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