Like many I hate noise. But maybe we have a greater fear of silence | Stuart Jeffries

I’m used to the daily onslaught of loud city sounds, and yet when I visited a retreat I found the quiet unbearable

Whenever I leave home now, I make sure to put on my headphones. They’ve become as essential to my daily kit as bus pass, book and shoes. Why? They’re a snowflake’s defence against aural microaggressions.

It’s a truth insufficiently acknowledged that on buses, those with the least worth saying take up the most airspace. “I’m on the bus,” say the loudest. If you listen – really hard – you can make out other passengers, me included, rolling their eyes in response. Is there somebody on the other end of loud talkers’ phones? In my unscientific survey of London’s number 91, in only 10 to 15% of cases.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2GVvWTR