A few nights ago I was sitting in the Hyde Away Inn in Waitsfield, Vermont, watching the Winter Olympics. NBC showed women's half-pipe snowboarding. People at the bar were shouting at each other, the wait-staff couldn't hear the orders. Even the TV commentators were screaming.
And I thought, we truly live a life of noise, and the noise is damaging our lives.
This was hardly the first time I'd had such a thought. It struck me most strongly three years ago, on a subway platform in New York City, when three trains roared through simultaneously. The ruckus they made was so intense that I had to clap my hands to my ears. My face took on the agonized grimace of a root-canal patient. It was then I suddenly realized that the level of sound I lived in had become intolerable for me.
In the years since then I have done a lot of research and even written a book on the subject of finding silence. But the scale of the noise problem keeps hitting me in different ways; as it did in that bar in Vermont, when looking around me, I saw forty people, all with mouths wide open, yelling to be heard over the surrounding din. "We couldn't see squat!" one man shouted. "Squat," his companion agreed, "forget it!" They were downing tequila shots.
Meanwhile NBC's expert was howling that one competitor had won medals in the X-Games, while her rival had also won medals in similar events.
Another expert came up with the shocking insight that both wanted to win a gold medal at Vancouver.
This is one kind of harm an overdose of noise causes. The value of the aural message-the signal-is degraded. Only the simplest, dumbest message can get through the interference. "You can't see squat." "Olympic competitors want to win a gold medal." "I need another beer." I would of course argue that the last message, simple though it is, is also pretty crucial, in a bar.
But those who live in complicated, post-industrial societies need to be able to send and receive complex and subtle messages. And it's precisely in these societies, which work at such a high level of sound volume, that complex, subtle messages get drowned. By noise, here, I mean both high volume levels, and also overdose levels of information.
Think of the ongoing debate on reforming health care in the U.S. Here the vast background issues: thousands of different forms of government intervention, the pervasive influence of big pharma, America's libertarian traditions, the European models, the overall balance to strike between state investment versus an inflationary deficit-cannot get through because of noise. The noise-about "death panels," "right-wingers," and "socialism"-comes from TV, radio, tabloids, internet polls, websites, tweets, and email traffic. And from blogs.
Most of the commentators, and their audience, are yelling at each other as opposed to trying to understand. "Shut up and listen!" I want to tell them; but I'd never get through the noise they make.
In this blog (and yes, I'm aware of the irony), I will be writing about noise of all kinds: from information overload, to the excesses of brute physical noise that damage our hearing and shorten our lives by rocketing stress levels into the stratosphere.
More importantly, though, I will also write about silence. How important it is, for our health and sanity, to protect ourselves from excessive sound levels by finding quiet environments. How to take time out from the din of daily life to listen to ourselves, and to each other.
To find, in the absence of noise, meaning.
