It’s one of those things that’s easy to ignore until it isn’t.
You notice it properly one day, usually when you’re already slightly tired or trying to think, and after that it becomes difficult to un-notice. Not loud in the obvious sense—no one’s shouting, there’s no argument, nothing you could reasonably complain about. Just a steady level of unnecessary noise that seems to follow you everywhere.
A café, for example. Not a busy one, not a chaotic one. Just a normal place, people sitting around, talking. And then one table, slightly too loud for the size of the room, going through a detailed account of something that really didn’t need to leave their own heads, let alone reach the far wall.
Or the person on their phone in a supermarket, holding it out in front of them on speaker, as if their ear has been temporarily retired. You get both sides of the conversation whether you want them or not, which is generous, in a way.
It’s not aggressive. That’s what makes it hard to push back on.
It’s just… constant.
Individually, none of it is that serious. You wouldn’t stop someone mid-sentence and ask them to lower the volume of their own life. That would feel excessive, even if the thought crosses your mind.
But it adds up.
You get enough of these small intrusions and something shifts in the background. The space changes without anyone agreeing to it. What was neutral becomes slightly agitated. You don’t always register it consciously, but it’s there—like trying to think with a radio playing quietly in another room that you can’t quite turn off.
You adapt to it, of course. Everyone does.
You move seats. You leave earlier than you planned. You put headphones on, even if you weren’t listening to anything five minutes ago. It becomes normal to carry a small, portable barrier between you and other people’s conversations, which is a slightly odd solution when you think about it.
The easy explanation is that people are just inconsiderate.
Some are. That’s always available as an explanation. But it doesn’t really cover how widespread it is, or how casually it happens.
Most of the time, people aren’t trying to impose themselves on a space. They’re just… talking. Filling it, without really noticing they’re doing it.
And once you start looking at it like that, it becomes less about manners and more about something else.
People don’t seem to like silence very much.
Not the kind you get when something interesting is happening, but the other kind. The empty sort, where nothing is pulling your attention and there’s nothing to respond to. The kind where you’re left with your own thoughts for more than a few seconds at a time.
That tends to get filled fairly quickly.
Conversation, commentary, background noise, anything that keeps the space occupied. It doesn’t have to be important. It just has to be there.
You can see it happen in real time. A brief pause in a conversation, a gap where no one’s speaking, and within a second or two someone steps in to plug it, often with something that didn’t need saying but felt necessary in the moment.
Not because it added anything.
Because the alternative was… nothing.
Once enough people are doing that, the baseline shifts.
What used to feel loud becomes normal. What used to feel normal starts to feel slightly too quiet, then a bit uncomfortable, then something that needs correcting. The room fills itself, gradually, until silence feels like an absence rather than a default.
And at that point, it’s not really a choice anymore.
You can’t ask someone to be quieter without, in a small way, asking them to sit with something they’re actively avoiding. Which is why it rarely works. It’s not just a volume issue. It’s doing a job.
So the adjustment happens elsewhere.
You learn which places are worse than others. You position yourself more carefully. You bring your own silence with you—headphones, music, something to push back against the general level of noise.
It’s all fairly manageable.
Just slightly backwards.
The person making the noise usually doesn’t notice it. Why would they? From their point of view, they’re just talking.
The person affected by it notices almost immediately, then quietly rearranges their environment around it.
That arrangement tends to hold.
It’s not a crisis. It’s not even a particularly important problem.
It’s just there, all the time, like a low-level hum you didn’t agree to but have learned to live with.
Before you say something out loud, it’s probably worth a quick check.
Does it need to leave your head, or are you just avoiding being in there on your own for a minute?