I have never lived on my own for more than a week. I am used to living with family, or friends in dorms. Last winter break, I spent a week living in a room by myself with almost no one else in the residence hall. I nearly went insane because of how awfully quiet it was.
At home, I live with my parents and three siblings. I can never get more than a minute of silence. It is not exactly a constant clanking of pots and pans and screaming arguments between my little brothers. While that exists from time to time, it mostly sounds like a harmony of boiling kettles, footsteps, turning pages and Facebook reels from my parents’ room.
Although I have my own fully furnished place, to a lot of people’s surprise, I do not live there. I actually hate being there. It is too silent. My notifications echo and my sneezes are followed by an uncomfortable nothingness instead of a series of “bless yous.” I have never spent more than two nights there. I choose to stay somewhere that does not feel like a post-apocalyptic shelter. I am still baffled by how many people’s goal in their 20s is to live alone. That sounds like a nightmare to me.
Of course, I still need occasional quiet time — in a library, on a beach or in a forest. Then after a few hours or a whole day, I must go back to living with other people.
I believe that it is human nature to be uncomfortable with silence. We always interrupt it with dreadful jokes and unnecessary comments about the weather. It is not about our discomfort with our own presence, but rather the uneasiness that comes with not being able to feel life around us.
Living with people, whether it is sharing a room, a house, a dorm or even a campus, comes with a lot of noise in your space: a speaker blasting Chappell Roan in the shower, rushed footsteps across the hall before classes, your neighbors’ nonstop muffled giggling and the often terribly played instruments in every common area. For me, that is the indispensable sound of a vital community and the reminder that we do not live by ourselves in this world.
Yes, we do have a lot of practice rooms on campus for people to play music, but it was intentional to include these instruments in dorms and common areas. I personally love walking through the Platt lounge and hearing someone play the piano, even if they mess up every other note. I feel very human and alive hearing someone’s passion or hobby, little mistakes and all. It decorates our time in these areas the same way we decorate our physical spaces.
Living in a community comes with the price of giving up some privileges, such as, in this case, that of having a totally silent space. On our campus, there is often the expectation that individuals should limit themselves in certain aspects to accommodate others. While it is important to be considerate of the people you live with, this often backfires and creates an awkward space where no one feels they can be themselves. One person feels they can no longer sing in their room because they will annoy their neighbors, the other stops practicing the guitar because they think their strumming is too loud and another is changing the way they laugh because they are scared of being viewed as obnoxious. Suddenly, by the end of it all, everyone is quiet, awkward and unable to express themselves.
Our campus is gracefully located amidst a classic Pacific Northwest forest where you are guaranteed to hear nothing but the sound of the wind brushing against the leaves. We still have quiet hours to give people their much-needed silence in their personal spaces. The library is also open throughout the day for those seeking a quiet spot to study. Quiet spaces and quiet hours exist for those who need them, so why should one excessively limit oneself to accommodate a need that is already met? This is not an argument against real needs. It is an argument against silencing ourselves over needs no one has actually expressed.
It is hard to draw the line between where you should not limit yourself and where you should be considerate of others. Some people will read this and take it as a sign to party in their dorm on a Tuesday evening during midterm week, but what I encourage is normal noise: playing music, laughing, practicing an instrument — things you would normally do at home. However, at a time when people are expected to be sleeping, you should be considerate and not blast “Pitch Perfect 2” on the lounge TV next to the RA’s room. Find a different space to do that.
During the day, residence halls should feel like home. We should live as we normally do within reasonable limits. No, you should not blast speakers on full volume or attempt to play “Rush E” on the piano for the millionth time, but yes, you can show your friend the new song you learned on your guitar and you can sing along to that Phoebe Bridgers song when you are going through a breakup. This is what brings life to campus and makes it feel like a home; otherwise, it would feel like a prison where every one of our actions is limited to a tiny space.
If you are coming from a background where you had a space of your own, it is hard to adjust to a life where so many other people share spaces with you. Because of that, a lot of people end up quieting their lives down to not “invade” others’ space, often building an expectation for others to do the same. But in reality, sharing a space does not mean you are invading another’s — it is still your space, and your home for now. So live in it like it is your home and expect others to do the same.
Expect to be bothered as well, because yes, sometimes you will hate hearing everyone else’s lives when yours is giving you a headache, but that is the cost of building a space that everyone is comfortable in. Otherwise, if you see yourself as invading another’s space, you will see others as invading yours too. But if you see yourself as a person who belongs in that space, you will feel like everyone else and their noise belong as well.
I am reminded of my first week at boarding school, where I came with the expectation that such shared living means I have to change everything about my life to adjust. I was walking down the hallway of my residence hall and I saw a group of students in a room laughing and talking loudly. I hated them. How could they assert their own presence in a shared dorm?
I eventually became friends with these people and found myself in the same exact room I thought was obnoxious and doing the same things that made me hate them when I first arrived. Reflecting on this, I realize that the only reason I was bothered by them at all was because I forced this limitation on myself and not because they posed an inconvenience to me. I decided to be quieter to accommodate others, and when I saw that others were not doing the same, I assumed they were not considerate or caring of life in a shared space. But really, I not only liked their noise, but wanted to be part of it.
I encourage everyone here not to hinder their normal ways of living just to be quieter. As Slayyyter says, “crank it.” Yes, there will still be people like Charles who would hate it if a cat let out a meow louder than 50 decibels or if a bird sang for the sun to shine. But these people have many ways of accommodating themselves. The college provides them with a vast forest and quiet library; Campus Living gives them quiet hours after 10 p.m., and Sony gives them noise-canceling headphones. As Sartre once said, “Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.” So use your freedom to navigate the world as it is, instead of demanding that others give up their freedoms for your needs.
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