noise operates as a mechanic that depletes attention and is cheap to produce. silence alone provides noise with meaning, giving it a relative contrast. in our digital worlds where producing audio frequencies became free [speakers, headphones] and metropolitan environments always have some activity or obligation to move inside noisy vehicles, natural hearing loss creeps with age, and natural winds and weather produce sound, silence became a scarcity that only a few can afford. “first, there was silence. then there was information. then information became survival, but without it, there is still silence.” what we call energy is owned-by and lives-within nothingness. amidst chaos, silence is the most natural element to revert-to. chaos is entropy and change; silence is the pause between it or what we call “time” - the friction it must traverse through.

a “luxury”

best understood by comparing how expensive it is to arrive at a median decibel-level (db). the distribution of db-loudness can roughly be put into a positively-skewed bell-shape, peaking at normal noise levels depending on the area (windy/crowded). the height of the curve represents how cheap it is to be surrounded by that level of noise. the upper end only starts getting expensive at severely high levels [hearing loss] while the lower end towards zero exponentially gets more expensive once attempting to go below room-noise levels. in other words; the equipment needed to establish silence [bunker, full noise absorption, no echo] is non-linear compared to how much noise it could buy [heavy speakers].

speech [the social sphere]

speech is the most common noise a human body produces. it costs the speaker almost nothing - the cost is paid by the listener; in attention. modern minds are kept in a state of constant output; stress is discharged through talk, appealing to placeholder-problems, not strategic weight. the urge to fill a gap is mostly irrational: an unstimulated nervous system hearing silence as a possible threat. talking becomes addiction to create an illusion of certainty without preparing it. silence is a position, not an absence.

humor/absurdity deliver high social stimulation at low noise-emission. since humans are social creatures, efficient forms for reinforcing emotional depth and connection are more viable than mere presence or vocal involvement. they satisfy the need for basic emotional connection without requiring long episodes of engagement.

a “social luxury”

being able to be mutually silent socially with others is a luxury, because it can only result from a managed situation without open ambiguities, problems, or plans that require communication. achieving a state where mutual respect is known, not constantly needing pings - where next actions are planned and scoped into the relevant timeframe, not requiring pre-emptive mind-bending with nebulous data - where routines and actions are established non-verbally, reinforced through mutual trust - where having the impulse to broadcast a thought loudly flows into productive energy of prototyping and making it a reality instead of overwhelming other’s focus - where sensory stillness is valued and not primordially interpreted as hostility by inner self-image shortcomings, producing doubt. it’s really a luxury.

progression towards it works in tiny steps of increasing the time-pause within dialogues while decrementing the time-length of uninterrupted speech from a single party. e.g. intensive debate with monologues and statements vs terse communication with extended reasoning/observation gaps in-between. positive: “look, a bird” {5s} “wow .. beautiful” {12s} “yeah, right?” {45s} “i wish i could feel how the wind flows around my body like that” {7s} “yeah.” being a single party that applies this principle, conditions the other into interpreting silence as harmless deliberation, reducing social tension. with really anxious ones, making pauses between self’s unfinished sentences (“i think that-” {4s} “-this is a great entry”) can build a stage for this progression. mirror neurons and adaptive communication styles will normalize increasing silence-gaps.

strangers and attention

attention is deserved, not given. conditional guidelines can steer naturally noisy talkers. it requires knowing what they want form self first, then guarding it behind a simple policy. much like an api protocol that can send errors on a faulty call format. e.g. “i know you want a solution to this problem, so provide me with the essential information i request, not trivial details and tangents.” humans often take it for granted that even if they treat others badly, they still get what they want out of them (not silence/absence). making the current dynamic clear with boundaries, in appeals to results and consequences, enables expectable results from communication, not meaningless drift. overall, this reduces ambiguity and noise while increasing seriousness and weight of words.