I’m not able to do my work with music, or even noise-canceling headphones. I’ve tried, and it doesn’t work.
I know that I’m unusual, in that sense, but there you have it.
I do listen to music, on my morning walks, though. That’s the only time, during the day, when I do.
I prefer to work in silence. But by that I mean actual silence. However, I live in a city where there's construction going on I can hear through my window. If I have to work from the office, there'll be colleagues yapping around (helps with creativity or whatever the sugarcoating is for the open office). Bonus points for one of the offices being next to a different construction site.
In these situations, I tend to prefer having some kind of "ambient" music on, instrumental only, so I can be isolated from the distracting environment. Noise cancelling doesn't work well enough against voices, although I do enjoy the reduction of random ambient noise (A/C hum and the like).
I'm similar except idk about silence, My preference would be natural local sounds, wind,bugs, birds (not mockingbirds lol) but have to settle for music pretty often.
What I want is something that isn't distracting. Most natural sounds are fine. The main exceptions that come to mind are some birds that are extremely annoying, such as seagulls, and, for some reason, fast-flowing water.
You're not unusual. Constant need for something in your ear is a very new phenomena and for some reason a lot of people have gotten in the habit of isolating themselves from the world around them and stopped being in presence of the reality. Sad.
> Constant need for something in your ear is a very new phenomena and for some reason a lot of people have gotten in the habit of isolating themselves from the world around them and stopped being in presence of the reality. Sad.
Convenient narrative, but not at all a new phenomenon. I had friends like this in the 90's. And I'm not seeing more people like this than in those days.
I know we're kind of used to rapid societal change at this point, but I'd still consider the 90s or even the 80s recent enough that I could call things that arose in those times as "new phenomena"... from a broader societal standpoint at least.
I can agree with that. Cable TV, Walkmans, and well, even just TVs in general are to blame.
Not even just the 90s. This is self-stimming behaviour. People have been doing this for as long as there’ve been entertainment. This is just normal human behaviour. People using technology to aid them in this is just the modern day version of it. It’s normal. And it’s frankly quite ridiculous to see adults thinking this is ye old “people are soooooo into tech nowadays, them junkies!!!111!!!11!1!”. C’mon now.
It is a problem of degree, not of kind, in contemporary society. The degree today to which people require / can seek out distractions today is not likely "normal" compared to what we know of past human history, although the desire to do so is likely the same old desire that has always been there.
Isn't this like self-stimming or self-regulatory behavior?
Have you tried brain.fm?
Thanks!
I’ll check it out, but it’s still likely that I won’t listen.
Cheers. Let me know.