I didn’t really realize how much my house (and world!) beeps at me until we went to the woods and I thought a bird was my dishwasher.
I never really thought much about noise. I tend to be fairly noise-tolerant. I work in a shed in my backyard, which is sometimes quiet and sometimes surrounded by power equipment from my neighbors on all four sides. Screaming kids, barking dogs, none of it really bothers me.
And maybe it’s that there’s so much noise these days, or that the electronic noisemakers everyone carries with them are so jarring, or that I’ve spent so much time working to disentangle my brain from the internet, but the sound of other people getting phone notifications is the one sound that consistently bugs me. (Or maybe I’m a genius now?)
I tend to think of phone notifications, whether they’re audible or not, as invasive noise. Whenever I download an app, the first thing I do is make sure notifications are turned off. The only apps that notify me (silently) are texts and Voxer, and I toy with turning those off too, although mostly what I do is keep my phone very far away from my body.
Maybe also I need to turn off the songs my dishwasher and washing machine sing to let me know they’re through, although there is an elaborate mom joke I do occasionally where I make up a song on the spot to the tune of the singing appliance, and I am only able to correctly time it every few months, but it’s a bit of improv I greatly enjoy, so for now the dishwasher song stays.
so much beeping