My older brother is married now! I wish him and his wife all the best. They’re such amazingly nice people, and they deserve all the happiness in the world. The celebrations were excellent: They had their ceremony at the zoo (we got to feed giraffes there), and their reception was at a fantastic restaurant in Zürich known as Grain.

I wanted to write about something I experienced while at his stag do. The day was excellent — we went to a whisky tasting, indulging in the drinks that were very strong (up to 50%). Then, we were driven to the airport by my middle brother (who wasn’t drinking, luckily), where we had a joyride on a flight simulator, run by an actual pilot. We flew an A320 from Innsbruck to Zürich, with my brother in the captain’s seat, and rotating the first officer between me, my middle brother, and the best man.

The procedure for starting an aeroplane has quite a lot of steps. The whole cockpit is covered in various buttons and switches, and almost every section has to have one or two of these actuated. One of the first things you do is turn on the air conditioning. This makes a noise, naturally, the pneumatic cycle running air through a constricted space. But as you move on to the other steps in the start-up procedure, and then proceed to actually trying to keep the thing in the air, you wholly forget the noise is there.

But it’s there.

The pilot was a good instructor. We managed to deal with a fire and land, then proceeding to take off and land in Zürich, rotating the captain’s seat this time. I had to do a go-around, and hit the brakes too hard on my attempt, leading the plane to veer off the runway after landing. The others had more success, though crashing was disabled, so we didn’t know for sure if we’d touched down perfectly or had been corrected by the simulation software.

Before we proceeded back to the best man’s flat to engage in further revelry, the pilot helped us shut down the plane again. And only once we switched off the ventilation did the pilot point out how silent it was, and how loud it had been before. He then added some remarks on crashing, and on the fact that, when in the air, you can’t just pull over and take a breather when something goes wrong, you have to keep focused until you’ve landed and taxied off the runway.

I’d argue that many of us experience this noise in our day-to-day lives. Especially in a high-workload environment such as the ETH, where the noise can stem from a feeling of not doing enough, impostor syndrome, anxiety about grades or money. But even on a broader scale, the noise might come from knowing the goods you consume are produced in an unethical fashion. It might come from the belief that the world is going up Schitt’s creek. When you become older, it’ll likely be from joint pain and a lack of fulfilment in your professional life, and perhaps your social one too.

The characteristic feature of the noise is that you don’t really notice it, until the moment when it’s pointed out. And even if you know the noise is there, you can’t possibly know which one of the switches you have to press to make it go away. You can only know definitively if something is a source of noise if it gets a little quieter when you disable that source. And that’s the problem — the source might be essential to continued functioning.

But the noise is always there, incessant. To quote The Matrix:

You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes.

So there is a life-long battle to find which sources of the noise can be disabled and which must be lived with. Unlike the Matrix, everyone’s noise is personal, having some sources in common with other people, but other sources are more unique, creating a droning, seemingly-insurpassable blend. This is why it can only be dealt with on a personal level as well.

And this is the worst part: You can live your whole life not even knowing it’s there, but just having your happiness be invisibly diminished and your potential wasted. The other edge of this sword is that once you do notice it, you see how bloody loud it is, and at that point it must be dealt with directly. Some people block their ears, but this just makes it worse in the long run. It’ll get louder and louder until it reaches the same level in your perception, but now you can’t hear anything else, either.

There is a silver lining. Namely, that many sources of the noise are shared. This means that they can be dealt with quickly, creating a vast improvement. Resisting consumerist urges, for instance, leads to less financial stress, tidier living spaces, slightly more free time and greater health (due to being less sedentary for the sake of convenience).

But still, what I wouldn’t give to have even just a moment without that noise.