One of the more dispiriting discoveries of adulthood: the creeping intolerance to noise. When I first moved to Boston five years ago, the city’s sonic chaos barely registered. I slept through sirens, tuned out construction, rode the T without incident. Now? I can feel my blood pressure spike with every honk, every overheard phone call. My body responds like an over-caffeinated zoo animal—tense, twitchy, low-level enraged.
Some noise still feels like a gift. The good kind:
- Music, as long as it’s mine—or at least coming from someone who respects volume as a social contract.
- Kids laughing, as long as they haven’t eaten Skittles in the past thirty minutes.
- Birds, leaves, wind, crickets. Nature’s white noise.
- That warm, indistinct hum of conversation in a crowded restaurant, the audio equivalent of ambient light.
But then there’s the rest. The bad noise:
- Music that arrives uninvited: car stereos, leaky headphones, subway buskers with dreams unmoored from talent.
- Drunken bellows, performative laughter, people who speak in all caps.
- Children whining like broken sirens or shrieking near my food.
- Sirens, car alarms, souped-up engines, idling buses—the mechanical chorus of modern life.
- And of course, construction. Always construction.
It’s not just annoying. It’s destabilizing. See: the spike in neighbor-on-neighbor violence over speaker volume. See also: yesterday’s commute.
In just 25 minutes, I was ambushed by no fewer than a dozen assaults on the eardrum. Jackhammers, honking, a car alarm, some godforsaken meringue track that appears to be the only one ever produced, playing on loop from a too-loud sedan.
Even Kendall Square, with its illusion of quiet respectability, couldn’t deliver peace. The T offered a pre-recorded scold about unattended baggage, a preschooler testing the limits of indoor voice, and a woman muttering “uhhmigod” like an incantation. I emerged downtown to what is essentially one continuous construction site, all of it threaded together by a wall of buses, trucks, and type-A drivers who believe horns are a form of punctuation.
The final insult: an ambulance wailing through gridlock, inching forward at 5mph while the rest of us clutched our skulls.
This city is aging me. Accelerating the decline. If I’m lucky enough to make it forty more years, I’ll be spending them on a hobby farm, where the only things that beep are egg timers and maybe the goats.
