On Annoying Sounds

Ting, Ting, Ting or Toot,Toooot,Toot — at least a hundred or more times a day, notifications on your phone from your myriad apps, “Toot, toot-to-to-do-do-to-do-to” — message arriving on your phone, “Ding, ding, ding” — your car seat belt alerting you to wear it, “Beep, beep, beeeep” — your Microwave alerting you it’s done, and then there is your car door, your refrigerator door, your dish washer, washing machine, your elevator screaming please close the door, your fancy door bell alerting you that a car whizzed by in front of your house and the list goes on. Gone are the days when you could sit outside and listen to the leaves rustling in the wind or a friendly bird making itself heard. Annoying sounds have taken over our life and our peace (and a piece) of mind, and are here to stay.

I was sitting one Sunday afternoon and musing about how we humans have let our devices and their sounds take over our lives. Even ten (or is it twenty) years ago our life was different. I say twenty because, I distinctly remember a project manager on one of my consulting gigs (who liked to be copied on all the emails from everyone on the team) left his phone on vibrate on his desk and disappeared for eternity, leaving the rest of us to experience an earthquake every few seconds as a new email got delivered to his phone.

In our rush to become appaholics we have signed on to things that we probably never imagined. Why have we let this happen? Can we get our peace and our conversations back? Do we even realize what we are missing. Until we take a vacation in the wilderness where there is no cell signal or WiFi or on a Cruise ship with $$$ WiFi fee we don’t turn our sounds off. Gone are the days when you could wake up to a bird call. Often times even our sleep is interrupted by a police car or ambulance with its sirens in the distance.

Is technology exploiting our curiosity and enslaving us to be in the know every minute of our time? The choice clearly is ours but new tech assumes we want to use it and makes it difficult and often requires us to take an Herculean effort to opt-out even for a tech savvy person.

Are we safer now than we were 50 years ago, 20 year ago? Do we really need to know every time a car passes by our front door? Do we really want to know what our long lost friends from high school are saying every minute of our life? Is it so important to know what POTUS tweeted a minute ago? Have we lost trust in our own abilities to manage our time that we need to be notified about everything? Why have these different forms of notifications taken over our life? I can only imagine things getting worse.

So what really happened, how did we hand over control of our life to these notifications and through them to machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) bots. Soon these programs and their master minds will be guiding our lives at every turn, telling us when to wake up, when to leave for work, how we haven’t slept enough, what our BMI is, what we should eat and where we should eat, find friends in the neighborhood whom we can meet ( whatever happened to chance meetings ). Are we ready for this take over of our lives? Maybe we should all take time to learn how to turn off notifications and regain some of our peace so we can continue to be the impulsive thinking beings that we once were !!!