4 hours ago
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I’ve lived in South Korea for more than a decade, but it’s only recently that I discovered just how loud it is here. The bing-bong when someone presses the “stop” button on the city bus, and the accompanying sing-songy announcements in Korean, the beeps of riders scanning their transit cards to board or depart; soju-drunk office workers loudly singing off-tune through neighbourhood alleyways; obnoxiously loud K-pop music blaring out of storefronts; and songs that seem to change key at record rates as delivery motorbikes speed out of range.
In reality, I have relied on there being near-constant cacophony around me for the whole of my adult life. Without realising it, background noise became a kind of comfort to me, making me feel less alone. It started after university when I was barely scraping together a living, working jobs I didn’t want to be doing. I would soothe my loneliness and isolation in the evenings by playing endless hours of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit just for the ambient sound – the comfort of Detectives Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler bringing criminals of the worst kind to justice.
Years later, in Korea, I was much happier, but I still wanted to drown out the reality of the $60,000 of student loans I felt like I was spending a lifetime paying off and my feelings of impostor syndrome. So I bought all 10 seasons of Friends. Listening to Ross and Rachel argue in the background about being “on a break” while I did other things silenced the niggling voice in my head telling me I was, at best, average at everything and never going to dig my way out of debt.
After the results of the 2016 US election, things became even more extreme. I constructed my own iPhone surround sound system and I began filling every silence – from taking a shower to washing the dishes to folding laundry – with segment after segment from MSNBC or CNN. I knew the anchors’ names and reporters’ voices.
It was rarely quiet around me, yet I barely noticed. Then in 2023, I went to a solo writing retreat to avoid distractions at home. I started writing fiction again for the first time in more than a decade, and it felt incredible. I felt like I’d accomplished something creative for the first time in a long time. But the penny still hadn’t dropped.
When I got home, the nonstop noise started up again. I didn’t realise how much “harmless background noise” was hurting me until one day I noticed the sound of silence. Standing in the shower without my phone playing something in the background, I suddenly realised I could hear myself think. Ideas flew to me – phrases and lines I wanted to use in fiction short stories, inspiration for pitches to send to publications. I had been unwittingly drowning my creativity in a self-made sea of sound and I realised I had to stop.
The noise wasn’t just killing my creativity; it was crushing my productivity. Every project I took on from a client or creative thoughts I wanted to get down “on paper” took twice as long. Ideas came slower or not at all. None of us are strangers to the negative effects of sound. Studies have shown that noise pollution plays a role in common health issues like heart disease and high blood pressure, along with surprising ones like low birth weight. One researcher has even gone so far as to describe our sound obsession as “aural litter”: “If you could see what you hear, it would look like piles and piles of McDonald’s wrappers, just thrown out the window as we go driving down the road.”
I’m no scientist, but it seems clear to me that the more sound we allow to surround us as a society, the less connected we become to one another. We lose our desire to truly converse with our friends or partners, replacing our relationships with podcasts, talkshows, and never-ending social and news updates. We rely more and more on external input rather than looking within ourselves, cutting off our inner telephone wires and forgetting the sound of our intuitive voices – the ones that drive our decisions, creativity and how we view the world around us.
Realising what my noise habit was doing to me was the wake-up call I needed. I’ve drastically cut down on YouTube. I no longer take my phone into the shower, don’t listen to news clips while doing chores, and avoid having my earbuds in while I’m walking or commuting. I limit “writing background noise” to instrumental music, if anything at all. And when I’m tempted to turn something on that I know won’t help me, I pack up my MacBook and head to a favourite coffee shop for a few hours to work instead. Sometimes, I simply sit in silence for a few minutes and let my mind wander – to really feel it and the impact it’s made on my writing life.
On election night 2024, I happened to be home in the US. Walking through Times Square in New York City on the way back to my hotel, I watched screens scroll through early presidential results. I took out my phone and turned on a “no news” focus I’d made weeks before. I didn’t want to be pulled in by the horror I assumed was coming; I wanted to preserve the quiet space I’d finally found and keep it sacred.
These moments shouldn’t have been such epiphanic discoveries, but they were: I need – no, crave – more silence in my life. My creativity suffocates without it. Sometimes, it’s still difficult to choose silence over noise, but the outcome is well worth the sacrifice of sound.
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Krissi Driver is a writer based in South Korea
