Have you noticed how LOUD everything is these days? Conversations in restaurants can be heard across the room. On public conveyances—trains, planes, ferries, buses—people are screaming. In one restaurant, the server had to lean on our table to get close enough to explain the menu and take our drink orders.
Is this because people have had huge hearing loss due to concerts, headphones, and general uproar on the streets? Has an Amazon parasite entered our Eustachian canal? Or is it because everyone now wants their story told so badly that they need to shout it out, fearing otherwise that they'll be lost and not heard in the world?
When we watch some streaming programs, switching from another source, we have to immediately lower the sound. I’m hearing, in public conversations, about bizarre family matters, crazed conspiracy theories, and UFOs (the last of which is probably the sanest).
What kinds of families do these people inhabit? Are their homes such that they can only achieve what they want by outshouting everyone else? Does volume trounce accuracy? If you scream, “PASS THE SALT!!!” do you get it that much more quickly?
I think, in compensation, everyone is turning up their own volume. All of us have been next to cars where the driver has amped up the sound system and left the windows open so that no one can ignore the fact that this is a pitiful person with low self-esteem, desperately overcompensating. The fog horn on a ship should be loud, so should a fire alarm. But not a request to pass the ketchup.
And not the people in the next cabin on the ship, unless they are on fire.
As I’ve aged, inevitably my hearing at high ranges has declined. My audiologist finally convinced me to buy a pair of hearing aids, the “Rolls Royce” of their kind. They play music and receive phone calls, and I imagine that someday they’ll translate languages in real time. I wear then when in larger groups, and people are amazed because they really can’t be seen without staring into my ears, which polite people usually refrain from doing.
I was at first upset that I couldn’t really show off or brag about my “Rolls Royce of hearing aids,” which cost a lot of money.
BUT WHO KNEW THAT THERE’D COME A POINT WHEN I NO LONGER NEED THEM!!