Noise

Agreed, completely.

And nothing disrupts thought the way noise does, Schopenhauer declared, adding that even people who are not philosophers lose whatever ideas their brains can carry in consequence of brutish jolts of sound.

I think so much better, so much more fluidly and quickly, when I am out in the countryside away from city noises. Really it’s like I become whole different person mentally. In a city, I am stultified, dull and far dumber. And I am just the opposite away from urban noise.

One of the best things my partner and I have ever done in our home is to spend quite a bit of extra money building our very own whisper-silent computers. I now have to get within a foot of my machine tell if it’s switched on or not.

Our next living arrangement is likely to be far more rural than where we live now, mainly (for me) due to noise.