The Selfish Habit of Yelling on Phones

When some people are away it feels pleasurable. The reason for which it feels pleasant is that they are loud. They will use the phone and have a full conversation when a three sentence e-mail will be enough. They will posture and show off rather than consider that not everyone in the open plan office needs to hear them pontificate for a quarter of an hour or more.

During the pandemic I noticed that people like to yell on their phones, rather than speak quietly. They speak to be clear, which is commendable, but they speak with such loudness that you hear it next door. You might think "So what? That’s apartment life" but that is precisely the point. If everyone yells on their phones then privacy is dead.

Privacy is not just about people listening to our conversations or what we are doing. Privacy is the intimacy of silence. If children play and behave in a noisy manner, if music festivals play their music too loud, if people yell rather than converse on their phones, then the intimacy of silence is lost, for the imposition of noise pollution.

Noise pollution enocourages me to go out. I went out partially because I thought, "Since A is home and he’s a phone using extrovert I will hear loud speaking on the phone so I might as well be out." I was out until a few minutes ago, and within seconds I heard someone speaking loudly on a phone and thought "when this person is around I should flee."

The pandemic made me sensitive to noise pollution, especially construction works, and people speaking loudly, and selfishly. The problem is that I am a single person who doesn’t listen to music, and when I do listen to things it’s usually podcasts, or tv shows, via earphones. I rarely speak, rarely yell, rarely speak on the phone, so I hear noise pollution, because I make little of my own.

For years now I have planned my walks around fleeing noise pollution. I know that at a certain time of day certain types of people are noisy, so I flee. The alternative is the fan I use for white noise. It’s running now.

The irony is that I was sitting in the car waiting for it to get to eighty percent for half an hour or more, and I got home and thought "I should have waited until it reached one hundred percent.

In the end what I would like is mobile phones that don’t encourage people to speak loudly, and buildings that are sound proofed against male voices. They’re soundproofed against shower noises, toilet flushes and more, but not the human male voice. This should be the next step.