I always needed background noise in my life. Then I turned off my phone and embraced the silence | Krissi Driver

I‘Ve He lived in South Korea For more than a decade, but only recently has discovered how high here. Bing-Bong When someone presses the “Stop” button on the city bus, and the ads accompanying the singing in the Korean language, the whistle of the cyclists wipes their transit cards at the level or departure; SOJU-DRUNK office workers sing out loud out of transport through live alleys; K-POP music loudly from the storefronts; And songs that seem to change the key at standard rates as motorcycles rush to deliver.

In fact, I relied on the presence of Kakovoni almost fixed around me throughout my adult life. Without realizing this, the background noise has become a kind of comfort for me, which makes me feel lonely. I started after the university when I was barely combined with them, job jobs I did not want to do. I would like to calm my unit and isolation in the evening by playing endless hours of law and order: the unit of the private victims only for the surrounding voice – the convenience of the Olivia Benson and Ellist Stapler that brings criminals of the worst type of justice.

Years later, in Korea, I was happier, but I still want to flood the reality of $ 60,000 of student loans that I felt that I was spending life in my feelings and my feelings. So I bought all the seasons of the ten friends. He argues listening to Ross and Rachel in the background about “in a break” while other things were silent in my head, telling me that, at best, on average in everything and I will not get out of the debt.

After the 2016 US election results, things became more extreme. I built my peripheral sound system on iPhone and started filling all silence – from showering to washing dishes to washing fold – with the part after a category of MSNBC or CNN. I knew the sounds of names and the voices of the correspondents.

It was rarely calm around me, but I barely noticed. Then in 2023, I went to a single retreat to write to avoid deviations at home. I started writing the imagination again for the first time in more than a decade, and I felt amazing. I felt that I had accomplished something creative for the first time in a long time. But a penny still did not fall.

When I got home, the noise began without stopping again. I did not realize the amount of “harmless background noise” that hurt me until one day I noticed the sound of silence. Standing in the bathroom without playing something in the background, I suddenly realized that I could I hear myself thinking. Ideas flew to – the phrases and lines that I wanted to use in the fictional short stories, an inspiration for the stadiums to send to the publications. I was unintentionally closing in a seat of self -making and realized that I had to stop.

The noise was not only creative killing. It was crushing my productivity. Every project I did from a customer or creative ideas I wanted to get “on paper” took twice. The ideas came slower or not at all. None of us strangers on the negative effects of sound. Studies have shown Noise pollution plays a role in common health issues such as heart disease and high blood pressure, along with amazing such as low birth weight. One of the researchers has gone to the extent that our vocal obsession was described as “”Auditory garbage: “If you can see what you hear, the matter will look like piles and piles of McDonald’s covers, just delivered from the window and we go below the road. “

I am not a scientist, but it seems clear to me that the more the sound allows more sound as a society, the less we become related to each other. We lose our desire to really speak with our friends or partners, replace our relationships with podcasts, discussions, social updates and endless news. We rely more and more on external inputs instead of looking at ourselves, cutting the internal phone wires and forgetting the sound of our intuitive voices – those that pay our decisions and creativity and how we look at the world around us.

The realization of what the noise usually does to me is the vigilance invitation that I need. I was greatly cut on YouTube. I no longer take my phone to the bathroom, do not listen to news clips while doing household chores, and avoid earphones while walking or moving. The shortest “writing background writing” on useful music, if anything at all. And when I tend to run something I know it will not help me, I fill my MacBook and go to a favorite cafe for a few hours to work instead. Sometimes, I sit in silence for a few minutes and let my mind roam – really Feel This and the influence that I have on my life on writing.

On the election night 2024, I came across the home in the United States. While walking via Times Square in New York City on the way back to a hotel, I saw the screens practicing it through early presidential results. I took out my phone and turned on the “lack of news” that I did weeks ago. I didn’t want to deal with the horror that I assumed to be coming; I wanted to keep the quiet space that I finally found and kept sacred.

These moments should not be the discoveries of feast feast, but they were: I need – no, Eager – More silence in my life. Creative suffocating without it. Sometimes, it is still difficult to choose silence on the noise, but the result is worth sacrificing the sound.