I remember how life was quiet as a kid. I would play with dolls whose conversations were made up in my head and never spoken into existence. My mom would be downstairs cleaning, and my brother and dad would be outside, cutting grass and kicking a soccer ball. The windows would be open, and the only sounds filling the house would be the whirls of wind that only a spring day in childhood could make.
I could exist without having to be reminded of other’s existence. The silence of childhood started to dwindle, of course, when I was no longer a child. As my thoughts became louder as a teen so did the noise I used to drown it out. There would always be music, a video, or a show being played during every part of every day. Getting ready required switching between multiple devices capable of filling any bit of silence. There’s a reason I couldn’t stand to be surrounded in silence– my thoughts would be too loud. Teenagedom, not just for myself, makes it intolerable to listen 24/7 to the hormone-obstructed thoughts. Everyone doesn’t understand me; everyone is out to get me. Can everyone just shut up? Well, everyone besides the audio I chose over my own internal dialogue.
As I’m closing out my last teenage year, I’ve hit a strange marker of maturity. I want nothing more than silence. I have turned off the background noise my younger self needed to function. I don’t need to listen to music to study (or to write this article) because I trust my thoughts are what they tell me. And when I do consume external noise, it is quieter than what I would have chosen a few years ago.
Today, there is an overall shift in popular content, and it is all quieter than we would have expected. Is this due to a collective maturing? Or is it that we have found a way to tune out the world but at a lower volume? The latter is more likely. The TikTok feed that the algorithm and I have crafted is full of “Day in the Life” of millennial moms, bakers, and college students. These videos are filled with the sounds of their days, like the closing of a face wash, the placing of a pan, and the shutting of a laptop. Little dialogue is present, and if it is, then it is most likely the whispers of a 5 am wake up or a visit to the library.
It should not be surprising that we crave quieter content after the past few years of loud chaos, which included a global shutdown, presidential stirrings, and cultural upset. We want to turn down the volume of the world, and the way we do that is to create the virtual experience that it actually exists.
There are larger signs that people are desiring a tamer life. More people are moving away from large cities to places populated mostly by farms. Gen Alpha is predicted to be anti-social media after having their baby faces shown to their world without their consent. Their parents, older Gen Z and Millenials, are the last crop of children who got to experience a quiet childhood.
I, a 19-year-old, am grateful that I got to live a quiet childhood that I am trying to return to in the present. My brain wasn’t entirely clogged with the world’s noise until it was required for my survival.
Guards are coming down by decluttering our phones and minds so that we can tackle the sound systems that initially added to the noise. This shift in how we entertain and unwind is a larger sign of a simpler life and world to come. Hopefully, everyone can just shut up, so I won’t need to put my headphones back in.