Noise rules the world6 min read

These past few years I turned into one of these annoying people. Without intending to I became more and more sensitive to noise. Sometimes I try to re-frame the whole thing and express it in a more positive way. It is not that I am sensitive to noise, it is that I crave more quiet. Glass half full. There’s been an expression making the rounds, it starts with the letter “h“, and it gets used for people like me. And it’s true, I probably am. But I refuse to label myself like that, because first of all labels are small boxes and boxes should be avoided. And second of all, giving yourself a label, auto-diagnosing, is too often used as an excuse to prevent change.

Without wanting to moan too much here, but sensitivity to noise can turn into quite the handicap in a world, where an increasing number of activities are done with louder and louder machines. The weed whackers, the leaf blowers, the chainsaws, and every neighbor needs to get one. And this noise gets added to the car and construction noise and planes and barking dogs and screaming kids and inconsiderate neighbors, that we already all live with anyway. We just experienced a week here, where near our flat they were cutting trees using a small army of chainsaws. The week culminated with a day of moving the trees that were cut to a pile with – wait for it – a helicopter. This must be the loudest possible solution for the problem of moving cut trees from a to b.

I don’t want to belittle the expression handicap, but it often does feel like my sensitivity to noise is one. And a costly one at that. We were forced to move seven times in as many years, always because the noise would not allow to sleep. A few times I had to cut vacations short, because of noisy hotel rooms. Recently we traveled to Paris twice, for instance, and I had to return home early after two sleepless nights, leaving my partner behind to enjoy the beautiful city on her own (thankfully she didn’t mind too much).

Use earplugs, you might say. Well, there’s a problem with that. I can’t wear earplugs, I find them uncomfortable, mostly because of my tinnitus. Earplugs may cancel the noise outside, but they turn up the noise inside my head. Ever since I shot my ears back when I was a club DJ, (which was silly, and may in part explain my sensitivity to noise) earplugs are not an option. Which means almost every day noise wakes me up, or prevents me from falling sleeping, and in the long run, this drains a lot of my energy. I really did not chose to be like this. But hey.

Trying to find a quiet place to live can turn into an odyssey, mostly because you never know what you are going to get with neighbors and things tend to get complicated fast. A few years ago we moved to a new flat. After a few weeks a flock of sheep was brought to a meadow in front of our house. The sheep were fine, but their bells kept me awake all night long. Bells are designed to grab the attention, to alarm. The noise of bells is one of the worst for me, it almost hurts me, the sound penetrating deep into my nervous system, must be a question of frequencies. After a few sleepless nights we decided to try and contact the farmer, who got annoyed, but in the end he complied to remove the bells. Even more confusing was a letter we received from our next door neighbor, who apparently loved the sound of these very bells. She was outraged and confronted us, why we would move to the country side, if we didn’t like sheep (or cow) bells? (Tt’s actually not even the countryside, more like a suburb, we live literally five meters away from the city border.)

Yeah, the Swiss love their cow (and sheep and goat) bells and they will not allow anyone to question those. Last year the story of a woman who had applied for a Swiss passport made the rounds. As a vegan she was part of a campaign fighting cow bells. Cow bells are not only noisy to some humans, apparently they also drive the cows themselves crazy. Just imagine carrying such a thing around your neck, already the weight of these things alone, it’s unthinkable. If you ever observed a young cow, wearing a bell for the first time, trying to shake the damn thing off, you will understand. The Swiss would not have any of this and the village flat out refused to give this woman a passport, despite the fact that she had lived here for 34 years. Do not dare to mess with our traditions, cows always had bells. (But did they really? And wouldn’t gps be a better solution to find them, which was the original intention of putting the damn thing on the cows?)

This ASMR video is pure torture to me [via boingboing]:

So guess what, I don’t want more cowbells. I want less. And church bells can fuck off, too.

Recently there was more bad news for us folks with the noise handicap. Wädenswil is a small town in Switzerland, where the church bells go off every fifteen minutes all through the night. Some people who live there tried to stop this, because it wakes them up all through the night, but the church would not have it. It turned into a legal battle that was escalated all the way to federal court. And in December 2017 the federal court ruled that the church bells will keep banging. Again tradition trumps consideration.

I am fully aware, that most people will just laugh, what a sensitive snowflake I am. And I agree, complaining about noise is such a first world problems. But I am sure many people suffer from it and it affects the quality of their lives deeply. Not being able to sleep is very taxing. Quite a few studies have shown that noise affects physical and mental health, and sensitivity to it makes the problem worse.

Quiet areas are getting more and more sparse, noise is taking over every corner of our planet. It is 2018 and still we build very loud machines for most of our transportation, cars, buses, planes, even trains could be much more quiet. So I just hope that this issue can be taken into consideration more and smart solutions can be found. One idea could be to develop certain areas in our cities as noise sanctuaries, where some extra measures are taken to avoid loud noise, and where people with this issue can move. It’s utopian, but may well be worth fighting for. Many people develop a sensitivity to noise later in life, so the dialog with younger people is also crucial (young people tend to be louder). And very important is to uphold certain building standards with noise reduction in mind. From a technological view point it has been possible to build soundproof houses for years already, but with costs getting slashed everywhere new buildings are no longer soundproof.