When noise becomes the norm
Walking in Toronto: flocks of screeching laughter behind you, shouting that echoes all the way up Yonge Street, sirens laterally traversing the soundscape—all while someone’s preaching with a megaphone at the corner. The phone is ringing—group chat messages, club updates, a reminder for where you were supposed to be five minutes ago, reminders for tomorrow’s deadlines… A text: “Sorry, can’t make our shift today.” Then the ringtone— “Have you eaten yet?” You put in your earbuds to try to block it all out, but it just adds to the noise.
During Thanksgiving weekend, I went home to my variant of Ontario Small City, and the sprawling suburbia had the deafening effect of December’s thick snowfall. With the ceaseless noise that I’d spent the last few months submerged in suddenly gone, I was left feeling groggy and destabilized. It was the momentum of all of those constant stimuli that had been propelling me forward; my days had been a series of reactions to text notifications, Quercus reminders, and shouting that forced me to cross the street. In their absence, I discovered myself exhausted and my senses dulled. Slowing down, paying attention to things that happened at home, and actively processing them was absurdly challenging. In the city, stimuli can only be afforded a brief interval of attention. All of it echoes, each partially-absorbed stimulus leaving an impression that merges with the next, forming an endless stream of noise..
However, there are some strategies for keeping up. Here, I insert my homebound GO Train activity: pulling out an old copy of Georg Simmel’s essay, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” which had been sitting in my bag since it was assigned in a class last year. Simmel discusses how the rapid pace of urban life requires reducing things into simple, quantitative terms rather than interpreting their subjective value. Our responses to the external world have become increasingly mechanized into a streamlined input-output system. Simmel terms this extreme rational attitude a “structure of the highest impersonality,” a “protective organ […] against the profound disruption with which the fluctuations and discontinuations of the external milieu threaten it.” In other words, to minimize the toll on us, we disengage from the subjective and emotional value of all stimuli and barricade ourselves with apathy.
The consequence of this kind of detachment from our surroundings is a numbing sense of alienation. Nothing makes much of an emotional impact, and we become passive processors of external demands. When we exist in a flux of reacting to one thing after another, dropping dead into bed at night, overstimulated, just to start it all over again the next day, we end up making no room for our own thoughts and meaningful identification with our lives. This state of perpetual distraction leads to what Simmel calls “the exclusion of those irrational, instinctive, sovereign human traits and impulses” which once guided life from the inside, replacing them with forms dictated from the outside. He describes a kind of loss of control, one that I have definitely felt. Letting the pace of Toronto dictate my own, I’m restless, unable to direct my own thoughts without external prompts. On the train ride home, even sitting with Simmel’s essay—which really isn’t that long of a read—had me residually jittery, looking for the next disruption to take my attention.
To avoid making this piece fully a lament of my own struggling attention span, I propose a prescription for this metropolitan condition: a purge. Or, less dramatically, periodic breaks from the city’s ceaseless echoes by forcibly creating time for silence and solitude, whatever shape that takes. It isn’t easy to pull away from the unrelenting clamour that fights for your attention, but we have to insist on maintaining some room for our emotions, our subjective beliefs, our /selves/. Turn off your phone once in a while, say no to that extra commitment, stay in… In the middle of all the noise, we have to insist on retaining control.