A Taste for Silence

It is totally normal to see teens and adults plugged into a portable music player in a plethora of situations. For instance, I have taken notice of couples walking hand-in-hand down the street each plugged into their own iPod. In another instance, I observed a young boy of 8 or 9 wearing his iPod during a Mother's Day breakfast at a restaurant he was dining at with his family. Now these two cases can bother you or not. They bother me. And they bother me perhaps for a reason that is not directly obvious or, at least, is not the expected one.

My concern does not lie in the fact that the people are not talking and interacting. Rather, it strikes me that these individuals (perhaps) cannot deal with the silence between conversation shifts, or the silence of waiting in a line (which, to be sure, isn't even absolute silence...but I won't get into soundscapes here), among other silences. (I won't bother here to take down the argument that these people just love music so much they need it at all times and in all places). What presses these individuals to have a constant musical soundtrack? Do they flee from their own thoughts? Do they flee from social interaction? These questions may seem to overestimate the valence of such a practice, but really, what does such a practice say about the state of the individual's comfort with themself or others? Furthermore, why is the practice verging on normalized? What does this say about the state of a society in which this is brushed off? I don't exactly know what it says...but I'm pretty sure it doesn't say something great.

Why not cultivate a taste for silence or enjoy your incidental soundscape au naturel? And then see where this takes you.