Sorry for the wall of text but this passage from Kundera [1] always comes to mind when I realize (or remember) that noise, somehow, is taken for granted by most people I know: I complain, and they say "stop whining". But it is extraordinary and should not be accepted as a "fact of life". Here's to hope that events like this will make more people aware of that.

“Another visit to Prague after 1989. From a friend’s bookcase I happen to pull out a book by Jaromir John, a Czech novelist of the period between the wars. The book is long forgotten; it is called The Internal-Combustion Monster, and I read it for the first time that day. Written around 1932, it tells a story set about ten years earlier, during the first years of the Czechoslovak Republic that was proclaimed in 1918. A Mr. Engelbert, a forestry official in the old regime of the Hapsburg monarchy, moves to Prague to live out his retirement years; but coming up against the aggressive modernity of the young state, he has one disappointment after another. A highly familiar situation. One “aspect, though, is brand new: for Mr. Engelbert the horror of this modern world, the curse, is not the power of money or the arrogance of the arrivistes, it is the noise; and not the age-old noise of a thunderstorm or a hammer, but the new noise of engines, especially of automobiles and motorcycles, the explosive “internal-combustion monsters.”

Poor Mr. Engelbert: first he settles in a house in a residential neighborhood; there cars are his first introduction to the evil that will turn his life into an unending flight. He moves to another neighborhood, pleased to see that cars are forbidden entry to his street. Unaware that the prohibition is only temporary, he is exasperated at night when he hears the “internal-combustion monsters” roaring again beneath his window. From then on he never goes to bed without cotton in his ears, realizing that “sleeping is the most basic human desire and that death caused by the impossibility of sleep must be the worst death there is.” He goes to seek silence in country inns (in vain), in provincial cities in the houses of onetime colleagues (in vain), and ends up spending his nights in trains, which “, with their gentle archaic noise, provide him with a slumber that is relatively peaceful in his life as a beleaguered man.

When John wrote his novel, Prague had probably one car to every hundred inhabitants or, I don’t know, perhaps to every thousand. It is precisely when it was still rare that the phenomenon of noise (motor noise) stood out in all its astonishing newness. We can deduce a general rule: the existential import of a social phenomenon is most sharply perceptible not as it expands but when it is just beginning, incomparably fainter than it will soon become. Nietzsche remarks that in the sixteenth century nowhere in the world was the Church less corrupt than in Germany and that was the reason the Reformation started precisely there, because the mere “beginnings of corruption were felt to be intolerable.” Bureaucracy in Kafka’s time was an innocent babe compared to today, and yet it was Kafka who revealed its monstrous nature, which since then has become routine and no longer commands anyone’s interest. In the 1960s brilliant philosophers subjected the “consumer society” to a critique that over the years has been so cartoonishly outstripped by reality that we are embarrassed “to refer to it. For we must recall another general rule: reality is utterly unashamed to repeat itself, but confronted with reality’s repetition, thought always ends by falling silent.

In 1920 Mr. Engelbert was still astonished by the noise of the “internal-combustion monsters”; the generations that followed found it natural; after initially horrifying man, sickening him, noise gradually reshaped him; through its omnipresence and its permanence it ultimately instilled in him the need for noise, and with that, a whole different relation to nature, to repose, to joy, to beauty, to music (which, now become an uninterrupted background of sound, has lost its char“acter as art) and even speech (which no longer holds a privileged position in the world of sounds). In the history of existence this was a change so profound, so enduring, that no war or revolution can produce its like; a change whose beginnings Jaromir John modestly noted and described.

I say “modestly” because John was one of those novelists called “minor”; still, great or small, he was a real novelist; he was not just copying truths stitched on the curtain of preinterpretation; he had the Cervantes-like courage to tear the curtain. Let’s take Mr. Engelbert out of the novel and imagine him as a real man who sets about writing his autobiography; no, it is nothing like John’s novel! For, like most of his ilk, Mr. Engelbert is accustomed to judging life according to what can be read on that curtain hanging in front of the world; he knows that the phenomenon of noise, however disagreeable it is for him, does not deserve interest. But freedom, independence, democracy—or, seen from the opposite angle, capitalism, exploitation, inequality—yes, oh a hundred times yes! Now, those are serious notions, they can give a life meaning, render a misfortune “noble! Thus, in his autobiography, which I envision him writing with cotton stuffed in his ears, he grants great significance to the recovered independence of his homeland, and he rails at the selfishness of the arrivistes; as for those “internal-combustion monsters,” he has relegated them to the bottom of the page, a mere mention of a trivial annoyance that, in the end, is rather amusing.

PS: Much like Mr. Engelbert, I resorted to ear plugs, going through all the varieties of it as well as noise canceling headphones. Since about 1.5 years now, I use custom-fitted silicone earplugs and they are amazing. Each ear canal is shaped differently, even "within" the same person from side to side, and a custom fitting makes earplugs most agreeable to wear. I highly recommend this if you suffer from a "too noisy world" like me. They are expensive but the fit and apparent durability make them worth it. One of the best investments in my sanity I've made (so far).

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[1] M. Kundera. The Curtain (Le rideau). Harper Perennial, 2005.