How our noisy world is seriously damaging our health
29 comments
·March 16, 2025ksynwa
jiggawatts
I have some local coworkers who’ve been “working from home” for months at a time from their various home cities in India when visiting relatives.
Whenever they un-mute their microphones in a Teams meeting there is an instant cacophony.
At first I was asking if they were working from a cafe table on a street corner or something, but no… invariably the answer is that they’re indoors at home!
ilrwbwrkhv
That really is the trouble with the third world. The economy might grow but it will take a long time for societal consciousness to reach a level where one can exist peacefully.
throwaway458345
I lost the past 10 years of my life because of massive mental health damage caused by noise pollution. Started after some seriously shitty neighbors moved next door, with dogs barking for hours without pause, 2 am courtyard parties, blasting music, honking instead than using the doorbell... we managed to move out 2 year later, and got thoroughly screwed by a private airport 3km away that brought small sports planes over us every few minutes up to 8 hours a day most days.
Had to move deep into rural country, giving up all prospects of a decent job, and yet even here there's plenty of noise from dogs, motorbikes etc.
Shitty time to be alive.
armada651
It's a societal issue. I've moved around the world and every place I lived is filled with noise. Then I moved to Tokyo, by far the biggest metropolis I've ever lived in, and yet I've never lived in a place this quiet.
The first time I met my upstairs neighbor he apologized for the fact he has two kids who will sometimes run through the apartment banging their feet on the floor. I told him that I never even noticed that. There's clearly more of an awareness here that you shouldn't bother your neighbors with noise.
Of course not every place here is going to be like that, there's going to be plenty of noisy areas in a metropolis like Tokyo. But you don't have to move out into the wilderness just for some peace and quiet if we're all just a bit more considerate of our neighbors.
Though nature doesn't care about the rules, so there is one source of noise I'll have to get used to: the deafening noise of cicadas in summer.
2OEH8eoCRo0
Is it unpatriotic, as an American, to envy the way the Japanese do things? I was stationed in Japan and really miss it. We could learn a lot.
dgunay
Absolutely not. I find it more unpatriotic when people say things like "we can't have that/do that here" as if the Japanese are an advanced alien race. It especially peeves me when they take this attitude with anything technological. America can do anything, when it gets out of its own way.
johnny22
I guess it depends on your definition of patriotism. I wouldn't use the word "envy" here though.
My perception of what what is patriotic is that we borrow what is most useful from the places our citizens come from.
throwaway458345
regarding Japan, does this still hold up nowadays with the newer generations raised on american pop culture?
armada651
My rental contract has specific rules about what types of noise I'm allowed to make and between what times. No parties after 10PM and practicing instruments in my apartment is banned altogether. This isn't something that's enforced just by popular culture.
hollerith
Ugh! And the small planes are probably allowed to use leaded fuel, so they will spew lead that slowly drifts down to where you are.
zusammen
I lived near a highway in college and agree. It’s awful. I’d never do it again.
plutomeetsyou
sounds like a homestead in the mountains could be one of the solutions.
KevinMS
I live in the American suburbs (New England). In the summer its lawn mowers every day and in autumn its leaf blowers every day. All for these vanity patches of grass that serve no real function. From comments on the internet it seems like it bothers some people but most just think of it as funny.
throwaway48476
Noise pollution happens within the home too. Every time I get an advertising notification from Google play that I can't find out how to opt out of I get a little angry. Advertising voice is equally repulsive. We need a way to hold platforms accountable for the health effects of their products.
rrix2
if you hold-press on any system notification in a reasonably modern non-nerfed android, it'll give you a gear that'll let you turn on/off individual notification categories. You can access this from the very top of the "App info" system page you get by hold-pressing the icon. For Play you want to disable "Payments, Deals, and Recommendations" category.
Most apps on my phone are on a "one strike" policy, and some don't use notification categories (like the Amazon shopping app) and thus don't get to make any noise and I rely on my mail receiver to email me when they accept a package instead of the Amazon push notifications
thfuran
I think we should ban third-party advertising altogether. Or rather, ban any kind of remuneration in exchange.
pedalpete
Recently I've been thinking that in some ways the way we are constantly using noise cancelling will have a negative impact on brain health.
Though I don't deny that we live in very loud environments, our senses, and particularly hearing, habituate to the noise around us. Though the study suggests there could be a link, we can't ignore the relationship between T2D and socio-economics. Diet and exercise clearly have an impact, but if noise pollution was a factor, wouldn't we also see non-metabolic factors in T2D, which I don't believe we are seeing as a general society. But I guess this has not been studied yet.
I am concerned about the lack of noise, and environmental queues that people get because they constantly have earbuds pumping noise directly into their ear, yet without the environmental inputs, echos, etc.
Angostura
My daughter told me about an article she read recently (sorry don;t have details) suggesting that noise cancelling headophones are hurting young people's hearing - not their ears though, but the part of the brain that helps distinguish conversation in loud environments or where many people are talking. Absolitelt no idea if this is true, but it sounded plausible
IvanLudvig
One of the most annoying things living in Italy are the ambulance sirens. They are excessively loud and are used too often, even during the night
dvh
"In the future, the most valuable thing will be silence" -- Voltaire
barbazoo
And clean air for many of us.
neilv
I happened to be taking notes on noise pollution for the last hour (15:30-16:30), and there were:
* 6 incidents of loud beeping trucks
* 6 incidents of loud car honking (all seemed to be automatic honks, like when someone gets in or out of their car, most right outside my windows)
All of that totally gratuitous added noise pollution. In addition to all the other, more necessary, noise.
This is a Sunday afternoon, in a very expensive residential neighborhood, in a college town.
You wouldn't believe what a typical weekday is like. I could start to tell you, and you'd be incredulous, then horrified, and then I'd have more to tell you, about how it's 10x worse than that. (Yes, I've been working with city officials, and will also move when I can.)
vorticalbox
I believe this is the study
tetris11
I've lived in a London suburb, populated by trains, busses, motorbikes, planes all roaring at any given time... but none of that disturbed me because it wasn't that much over the baseline background noise.
I've also lived in a quiet mountain village, and been woken up by chirping owls or bats, the odd cluck from a chicken, or a train passing all the way on the other side of the mountain. The baseline is lower, but you hear way way more.
hw-guy
The biggest issue where I live (Philadelphia) is the plague of motorcycles and cars with exhaust systems deliberately altered to maximize the noise generated. The police won't do a damn thing about it. Most people seem to accept and even defend this situation with one of the following retorts: 1. With all the murders and other crimes, the police should not be wasting time on this. 2. That's just how cities are; if you don't like it, move to the suburbs. 3. Kids are just having fun, Karen!
By the way, I've lived in the suburbs, and the situation with leaf blowers is just as maddening.
ilove_banh_mi
Everyone in my (US) family slams doors to close them, it drives me nuts. The whole building shakes. I blame the spherical door knobs, their design and appearance invites just pushing/pulling the door without gently grabbing and turning the handle.
sgt
Aren't door handles becoming popular nowadays though?
I live in an Indian and I avoid going out most of time and a big reason for that is the noise. Aa the article says about Dhaka, traffic is a major source of noise and it is unavoidable due to the absence of decent public transport infrastructure. But it's so much worse than that. Restaurants and even gyms play (terrible) music at volume levels which are defeaning and illegal in more reasonable places. But it seems like I am the only one who has a problem with it. It's tough not bring sensorially numb.