What Silence Is Trying to Tell You

We have become afraid of a sound that is not a sound. We have developed, collectively and almost without noticing, a profound intolerance for the absence of noise. Watch what happens in the ordinary moments of an ordinary day when silence appears uninvited. The elevator opens and hands reach for phones before the doors have finished parting. The red light turns the car into a small, temporary prison from which the radio must immediately rescue us. The meal eaten alone becomes an occasion for a screen, because the alternative, the quiet of a table set for one with nothing but your own thoughts for company, has become somehow unbearable. The last thing many people hear before sleep takes them is a voice from a device, a podcast, a video, a playlist, anything that fills the dark space between wakefulness and unconsciousness with enough sound to prevent whatever it is that the silence would otherwise say.