At the airport, you will often hear announcements being broadcast throughout the whole place. This is the final boarding call for… yada yada. There are also announcements calling this person to this gate, or telling us that this person lost some item. To any particular individual, these announcements are almost always irrelevant.
Paying attention
This is all noise. Noise is something which is unwanted. It is the opposite of signal, which is the thing you want. When you pan for gold, the gold is the signal while all the cheap rocks are the noise, which get discarded. When you eat nuts, you look for the edible part while discarding the shells. When you go to the supermarket, you look for the things on your shopping list and ignore everything else. Many things in life involves distinguishing noise from signal in some way.
In other words, there are some things people should pay attention to, and things people shouldn’t pay attention to. If people were to pay attention to everything, they would be exhausted. This is why it’s called paying attention — there’s only so much to go around and it’s possible you can go broke. People can only truly focus on one thing at a time, so they will get overwhelmed if there are too many things to focus on. If one doesn’t closely guard their attention, it would constantly get stolen away by all the other things floating around.
And because of all the things floating around today, it’s becoming harder and harder to focus. Eventually people fall into a permanently exhausted state, where they are unable to distinguish signal from noise. What happens then? They react to external stimuli without processing it in any way. They fall back on instinct. One of the instincts we have is to shut it off or tune it out. The classic “boy who cried wolf” story is really about how the boy kept falsely crying about the wolf all the time, so the townspeople got exhausted and shut off the noise, so they couldn’t help him when the wolf actually came to eat him.
This world is just too f**king noisy
We often think of “noise” as sound. But noise comes in all forms of information, not just sound. Airport announcements, for example, are relevant for only a small percentage of people who hear it. Everyone else either has to tune it out or listen to the whole thing, often over and over again. Advertisements yell at you from billboards, buildings, and large vehicles like buses. All this diverts attention from drivers, increasing the overall risk of driving on the road, and possibly causing accidents. Many road signs are distracting because they don’t contain the information relevant for a driver to get to their destination, and sometimes they may even cause people to get lost. The majority of news is noise to many people because it does not add anything of value to their daily life or mental well-being.
People add noise to the world in so many ways, often intentionally. People have also developed coping mechanisms to deal with all the noise, often counter-productively. It’s a real problem. How can we make it so that there’s less noise? How can we make noise easier to deal with? That’s for us to figure out.