Quiet at home: Silence and solitude in the time of COVID-19.
We’re more accustomed to noise than we know. With so much of the world muted, we must teach ourselves to accept silence.
The Bartender’s Handshake is a recent arrival in Des Moines, Iowa’s cocktail scene. Its name plays off a sacred ritual among bartenders in which one bartender pours a shot for a visiting bartender. This shot could be an ounce-and-a-half of straight Angostura bitters or Fernet-Branca, a play on a house amaro, or something more complex. The Bartender’s Handshake dedicates a section of their menu to these kinds of drinks, nestled among classic cocktails and new creations.
It’s my favorite bar in the city. Small and bustling, it’s often packed well after midnight with the laughs and hollers of good drinkers. The music is tinged with bass. Dim light spills through the space. A small collection of art spirals on the light wood of the west wall, with lovers and friends deep in conversation beneath it. All the humdrum and noise: it’s familiar, comforting.
All the humdrum and noise are gone.
Like so many social spaces, The Bartender’s Handshake has been reduced to a purse-lipped skeleton of itself in what’s been dubbed the “Great Lockdown.” There’s no milling about inside, no waiting for a table or barstool to open up. A GoFundMe page was created to support its bartenders, whose livelihoods, like so many of their peers in the service industry, were erased overnight. Thanks to added flexibility in state liquor laws, they are able to offer cocktail kits, beer, and wine to-go. But that’s about it.
COVID-19 has silenced bars, restaurants, playgrounds, concert halls, stadiums, schools, and any other social space around the world with a snap of its fingers. Anywhere — anywhere — for which noise is a beloved feature is purposely, even eerily, mute.
My apartment, too, is hushed. I am usually awoken on weekday mornings by the ignition of a loud truck in the parking lot, or the banging of cabinets in the kitchen as my roommate, a middle school teacher, prepares his lunch. Those sounds are gone. Mornings are dead-still as I brew coffee and crack the sliding door to the balcony to listen for spring birds. Sometimes, it seems they are the only sonic piece of the environment.
Not all spaces have fallen into silence. Hospitals are overrun, the voices of nurses and doctors on the frontlines murmuring alongside humming ventilators, chiming monitors, and the heaving breath of elderly patients struggling to stave off the virus. PPE suits, shrouding personnel in apocalyptic sleeves of white or yellow, rustle and weave through the maze of distress. Warehouses and fulfillment centers, buzzing louder than ever in the push to fulfill orders, face increasing scrutiny. India, in a frantic attempt at social distancing, inadvertently drove thousands of migrants into contact with each other.
But it’s where noise is absent — morning routines, coffee shops, church on Sunday — that our wits are stretched inexplicably thin. It’s quiet. Too quiet. And it induces an anxiety like no other.
Even as the world slowly reopens, the silence endemic to the virus will remain audible for a while. A return to normal will not — cannot — be instant, and may get set further back if a second wave COVID-19 takes hold. To weather this strange time, we need to ask ourselves why the silence of quarantine is so difficult. We need to ask ourselves if we’re dealing with it as healthily as possible. We need to recognize we’re silenced together. The more we let that silence get in our heads, the longer recovery will take.
It’s a quiet solitude we never wanted. We had better learn to deal with it anyway.
“Generally speaking, contemporary first-world…humans are just really bad at silence.” Dr. Kristina Grob is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina, Sumter who has focused on the ethics of silence since her dissertation. “First, the belief that silence is bad or that silence mostly equals silencing skews our perceptions. Second, while silence and solitude don’t necessarily entail one another, solitude makes silence easier to notice and engage with. But we don’t do solitude very well, either.”
Our distaste for solitude may be hardwired. Historically, Sigmund Freud and William James were quick to critique solitude, equating it with loneliness and thus stigmatizing it. More specifically, they spoke of a fear of solitude, an inability to handle it that starts in our scared-of-the-dark infancy. Evangelina Galanaki, a faculty member in the Department of Special Education and Psychology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece, cited some of Freud’s work in her essay The Origins of Solitude:
The prototype of anxiety is the fear of separation from loved ones…especially in infancy, the period of absolute helplessness. In the Freudian view, anxiety emerges in aloneness and darkness, only because these two situations mean separation, and if it persists throughout life, it becomes neurotic […]
Freud…distinguished between anxiety as a reaction to the danger of loss and the pain of mourning which is the reaction to the actual loss of the object. Thus, loneliness may be regarded as the painful longing for the lost object or for the loss of the love of the object.
We are reeling from not one, but many of Freud’s pains of mourning. There are the actual losses of friends and family, with deaths from the virus worldwide recently surpassing 200,000. We’ve watched our favorite restaurants shutter operations, some permanently so. Then there are all the losses associated with social distancing and quarantine that we know are temporary, but have no firm return date for: happy hours, pancake breakfasts, music festivals, Salat al-Jumu’ah at the mosque, wine-and-dine dinners on the company card. With church services effectively banned, Pope Francis has been wielding what tools he can to help Catholics around the world maintain community in quarantine, but — in some of the most striking images of the pandemic — doing so in an empty St. Peter’s Square.
Contemporary research has more directly linked solitude to poor health outcomes and increased loneliness. One review of scientific literature on loneliness over a 24 year timespan found living alone increased the likelihood of dying early by 32%. The Health Resources and Services Administration has labeled growing rates of isolation the “Loneliness Epidemic,” with 2 in 5 Americans saying their “social relationships are not meaningful,” and 1 in 5 feeling “lonely,” or “socially isolated.” The issue is pronounced among older Americans, prompting projects like the Togetherness Initiative, which approaches loneliness in the elderly as a “treatable condition.”
No matter the era, the conclusion is the same: solitude sucks. The solitude of COVID-19 is noiseless, reducing us to a child-like grasping for love and connection. What’s more, we are dealing with its byproducts — death, defunct dive bars, divorces and domestic violence — from our bedrooms, which makes us feel powerless. Yes: we recognize the necessity of self-quarantine and lockdown measures, and we defer to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s advice. No: we don’t really know what to do with our day once he’s done speaking.
We didn’t choose this solitude; we were forced into it. It’s also dead quiet. For a world that is increasingly noisy, that silence is debilitating. And not even the most insulated of us can escape it.
Pike Place Market in Seattle is normally a lively home to hundreds of craftspeople, small businesses, and residents of varying incomes. Its nine acres of space normally hosts 85 farmers selling their harvests in the marketplace. Over a dozen languages are spoken. The Market accounts for an estimated $150 million in goods and services each year, and hosts between 20,000 and 40,000 shoppers a day.
“I’m usually navigating crowds,” Beth LeValley explains to me in a Facebook video conversation. A 24-year old digital marketing manager living in the heart of Seattle, Beth walks through Pike Place Market to her office in Pioneer Square. “There’s chit-chat and traffic, street performers. And a lot of sirens.”
There’s no commuting through the market now. And even if there was, many of those sounds would be absent.
Beth began working from home at the beginning of March. In the time since, Washington State has confirmed over 16,000 cases of COVID-19, with over 900 deaths. Governor Jay Inslee ordered Washington residents to stay at home early on, and empowered law enforcement to issue citations for non-compliant businesses and residents.
The result of these measures in Seattle has been an emptier, quieter city. When I first reached out to Beth, she described the city outside her window — a Seattle without sound or movement — as “eerie.” I asked if she’d still use that word.
“You think of all those apocalyptic movies and shows,” Beth says, “that start with a desolate scene, an empty street.
“Yeah, it’s weird,” she decides. “It’s definitely weird.”
Beth joins an estimated 29 percent of Americans that have the ability to work from home. She doesn’t love it. While her individual team in the office is fairly small, she works in a collaborative workspace, with a floor designed specifically for professionals from different businesses to function with and around each other. She is used to running into people at the office coffee bar, pausing work to chat with them face-to-face. By the time she began working remotely, all these noises designed into her workplace had dissipated. They’ve now disappeared.
At home, Beth and her boyfriend have to “navigate working together, but not.” They take turns using the spaces in their apartment most suitable for work. They are alone together, and quiet. She still meets with her coworkers through Zoom, but without the sounds of chairs being moved around, printers printing, and without the profound form of collaboration that comes with being in a physical group of humans in a room.
Research suggests we do not realize the amount of noise that surrounds us, especially in urban spaces. We tend to walk to lunch, shop the market, and drink cocktails on patios in an unacknowledged but very audible din. As we hide from COVID-19, though, trapped in our individual spaces, we realize just how much noise we wade through in a normal day. The firing of car engines, the honks and hollers of upset drivers: muted. The horns of docking cruise ships in the harbor: absent, and probably for a while.
Dr. Grob calls this a “boring” silence, a form of quiet we are rarely forced into. “Until a ‘new normal’ emerges, there’s very little to say about this time except to describe it in banal terms,” she observes. “It’s ‘weird,’ or ‘hard,’ ‘bad,’ ‘sad,’ etc. — those aren’t terribly descriptive, but we don’t yet have very good language for what this time is in our lives. We haven’t yet succeeded in making meaning out of it.”
Instead, we are just trying to cope. We are succumbed to Netflix and Hulu, constrained to our apartments, reading every book and magazine that’s been trailing around our living rooms. Even our introverted friends have seen their moment disappear. Being quarantined is recognized so universally as a stressful situation, the CDC has published stress and coping guidelines specific to COVID-19. But no worries: liquor sales for the month of March suggest booze is helping us through.
Despite the struggles of adapting to work from home, Beth LeValley recognizes the privileged position she’s in. She is grateful for her steady job and her ability to be remote — two luxuries an estimated 20.6% of her fellow Americans would give anything for. She video chats with her family regularly and has virtual play dates with her young nephew. But she misses the skyscrapers in downtown Seattle that shine and glint in the sun, glass windows clambering up their sides. For those like Beth who work in one of these buildings, the windows offer a gorgeous view of the city, nested on the water and thrumming with activity. It’s one of the most beautiful scenes our noisy world can offer. But now?
“There’s no people to confirm the city is that size.” No voices, no footsteps, no bickering, no street performing, no flirting, no laughter on patios, no puking in an Uber.
Beth is right. It’s definitely weird. The people of Seattle — the noise they make — could not have just disappeared into thin air, though.
If the noise isn’t in the street, where is it? And wherever it is…is it helping or hurting us?
While COVID-19 has muted the world outside, forcing solitude upon us, social media has — in a crude, oxymoronic way — amplified. Viral “Top 10” lists, photo challenges, and TikTok dances have taken over our timelines. Memes and videos using humor as a coping mechanism have blossomed. Videoconferencing is having a heyday: apps like Zoom, Skype, and Houseparty have seen an increase in downloads surpassing 100 percent.
Inverse to the increased noise on their platforms, Big Tech firms are enjoying a respite from sharp critique. Prior to the spread of COVID-19, the Mark Zuckerbergs of the tech industry were under fire for their handling of personal information and data. In the midst of pandemic, though, those same companies are seen as lifelines of social interaction and grocery shopping. COVID-19 has, Steven Levy wrote in Wired, put the “techlash” on pause:
While Big Tech’s misdeeds are still apparent, their actual deeds now matter more to us. We’re using Facebook to comfort ourselves while physically bunkered and social distancing. Google is being conscripted as the potential hub of one of our greatest needs — Covid-19 testing. Our personal supply chain — literally the only way many of us are getting food and vital supplies — is Amazon […]
The pandemic does not make any of the complaints about the tech giants less valid. They are still drivers of surveillance capitalism who duck their fair share of taxes and abuse their power in the marketplace […] But the momentum for that reckoning doesn’t seem sustainable at a moment when, to prop up our diminished lives, we are desperately dependent on what they’ve built. And glad that they built it.
That desperate dependency may be exacerbating the pandemic. Unable to speak with our friends and family in-person, we are replacing that dialogue online, falling more frequently into the same digital rabbit holes we always have while we’re at it. We are allowing bad information and myths about COVID-19 to spread as fast as the virus itself. In a survey of 1,000 Americans of all ages by the Reboot Foundation, which supports projects to enhance critical thinking, Helen Lee Bouygues cites high numbers of misinformed social media users:
Unfortunately, an alarming number of those surveyed answered questions about COVID-19 incorrectly. For instance, 26 percent of respondents believed that COVID-19 will likely die off in the spring, and another 10 percent thought regularly rinsing their nose with saline will help prevent the virus. Another 12 percent believed that COVID-19 was created by people […]
[…] 22 percent of those checking social media once a week harbored at least one wrong belief about the virus. In contrast, for those checking social media hourly or more frequently, that number jumped to 36 percent, or a difference of 14 percentage points.
The spread of misinformation is even more harmful for already-silenced communities of color. Early rumors that COVID-19 was a “white disease” and associated with international travel to Asia may have delayed risk-reducing actions like social distancing and self-quarantine in black and brown communities, who already lag behind white communities on indicators of healthcare access and wellness. Chicago’s 30% black population has borne 52% of the city’s COVID-19 caseload and 68% of deaths. Similarly disturbing numbers are appearing in data from New Orleans, New York, and Detroit.
“It got so bad,” Van Jones noted in a CNN op-ed, “that Idris Elba, one of the first famous black victims of coronavirus, had to post a video begging black people to believe that people of African descent could get it, too.”
In a nasty paradox, the noise of social media is helping us manage quarantine while harming our ability to navigate it thoughtfully. Instead of pausing to consider what we watch or read online, we jump immediately into the conversation. We are starving for voices, music, jokes and laughter. In our need for connection — to hear and speak our social lives in full, as they existed before COVID-19 — we are just as virtuous and gullible as before.
“People are coping with [the pandemic] by upending their lives and attempting to virtually re-create what they lost,” Abby Ohlheiser wrote in MIT Technology Review. “The new version, however, only vaguely resembles what we left behind. Everything is flattened and pressed to fit into the confines of chats and video-conference apps like Zoom, which was never designed to host our work and social lives all at once.”
It’s not that reconstructing our social lives in solitude is the wrong thing to do. Networks of connection are the core of our power as a species. Community is, as Freud’s pains of mourning remind us, an essential function, and we’ll want it intact when we can venture again into the world at-will. Any attempt to curl into the fetal position and avoid community entirely is just as harmful as excessive scrolling.
But excessive scrolling is exactly what we’re doing. With it, we actively damage ourselves and our societies. A rabid use of media not only clouds our judgement of what’s true and false about the COVID-19 pandemic, but also risks worsening our general obsession with technology in the long-run. It fills the silenced spaces of our lives in unhealthy ways.
And we forget this is just some of the noise in our heads.
“How often is your mental space taken up with to-do lists, songs on repeat, imaginary adversaries, plans for snacks?” asks Dr. Grob. “Even when it’s quiet outside us, it’s often really loud internally.”
The truth may well be that we cannot live in solitude, cannot truly cope with quiet. Our twiddling thumbs and meandering minds are too used to the fast, chatter-filled pace of modern life. In a sense, we’ve let ourselves go; the process of adapting to a louder world, one of urbanization and push-button notifications, is well under way. Everywhere. COVID-19 will disrupt that trajectory, but it won’t alter it.
There are efforts to rebrand solitude and recognize its potential. Brent Crane, in a piece for The Atlantic, argues that solitude can be productive when it is “solitude as rejuvenation,” characterized by self-reflection that “can be restorative.” Research on the upsides to solitude, though just emerging, shows promise where being alone is an active choice. Philosophical circles are joining the conversation, too, exploring the idea of “non-action” or “silence” as virtuous.
For lifestyles that are adaptable to life in pandemic, lockdown has meant extra time to work on personal lives. Amazon is shipping out an increasing number of yoga mats and resistance bands. In Verona, Italy, a pair of star-crossed lovers have entered into a relationship after seeing each other from their balconies. There are an even rarer few for whom the pandemic almost didn’t exist, like a couple sailing the world together who had no idea about COVID-19 until they tried to come into port, only to find they weren’t allowed to tie up.
For Dr. Grob, the silence of COVID-19 could be useful for those who will let their minds sort themselves out. “We’re the kind of being that wants to make sense of things, and we do this in reflection if we’re lucky/well-taught, and by rumination if we’re not. Good reflection requires time and patience, and for some, this episode outside the normal way of things might actually provide the time for fruitful reflection.”
One tactic we can use in that reflection, she says, is to try understanding silence not as noise’s opposite, but as a “ground from which language can arise.” When we hear a lack of traffic as not-honking, or not-loud muffler, we freak ourselves out; that silence gets recognized as abnormal, and solitude becomes less bearable. Instead of forcing ourselves to embrace silence itself, we should prepare to embrace what arises out of it. There are other sounds that will fill the space if we let them. Some of the loudest so far, for instance, are the sounds of a world that can finally breathe.
“You have birds that are singing beautiful songs,” Beth LeValley says of her time spent at home. Nature has had a moment to speak up as we retreat to our private spaces. Decisions by many cities and towns to halt public works activities mean the whirring of lawn mowers in roadside ditches will be replaced by the loud, vibrant colors of wildflowers. Throngs of bleating goats have overtaken the town of Llandudno in Wales. With less boat traffic, sediment in Venice’s famous canals has settled, giving the waters a cleaner appearance, and air quality in the city has improved.
In one of the lower-pitched outcomes of the Great Lockdown, seismologists can now “hear” plate movement they normally can’t when a world of seven and a half billion people is functioning. “The fall in the human hum that rings around the world,” Ian Sample wrote in The Guardian, “means that…scientists should be able to detect smaller earthquakes in the UK, and more distant tremors in Europe and in countries further afield than their equipment usually allows.” Without the rumble of human movement (called “cultural noise” in the field of seismology) to quiver their equipment, seismologists literally have new noise to look forward to.
Where our footsteps aren’t causing a ruckus, the world is. We should take heed, because our world is stressed out; the silence brought about by COVID-19 creates a space for it to rest, and to remind us what it’s capable of.
But despite the benefits for an earth we’ve pillaged, or for stray lovers, or for home fitness routines, the fact remains that millions worldwide are laid-off or furloughed from work. Our movement through town and country is restricted, and that’s the only reason we’ve the time to work on ourselves. The anxiety arising from this kind of separation from routine — sudden, shocking, unsolicited — will mute much of our self-improvement. It means we aren’t purposely letting our world rejuvenate, so we’ll probably go right back to our old, oily habits. At the end of the day, most of us will be left worrying, scrambling for unemployment funds, wishing there was more to listen to in the mornings than the neighbor’s dog and a dripping pot of coffee.
The urge to reopen cities, states, and countries is incredibly tempting. In China, Wuhan is just beginning to get back to its feet, though normal life there is still far from restored.
The restlessness of quarantine has begun ruffling feathers in the U.S., with several states experiencing protests against continued lockdown. A recession is underway, putting pressure on officials everywhere to try and time the healing of the economy with the healing of public health.
Even Dr. Grob, whose livelihood is built around her study of silence, is not as good at coping with quarantine as might be expected. “I thought that all this sheltering in place should have been supremely easy for me. But it isn’t, at least not always. I’m used to spending much of my weekdays at school interacting with students in the classroom, and in my office and interacting with colleagues of course as well. It fills up a day, a week, a life — you know?”
This quiet solitude is challenging for everyone. If nothing else, we can help ourselves by remembering this shouldn’t feel normal, because it’s the farthest thing from it. Acceptance is the first step in any recovery program, and even if we didn’t do this to ourselves, we won’t get anywhere pretending we’re okay. We’re not. We’re decrying authority through facemasks. We’re either out of work, or not allowed to be at work. We’re scrambling for toilet paper. We’re celebrating birthdays with drive-by parades. The latter is clever, and certainly adorable. But it’s still not normal.
The most optimistic estimates for a return to any kind of economic “normal” say the world could turn again within a year. Many forecasts are more dire, with some arguing we’ll never see the economy we knew again. None of this changes the resiliency that defines our better instincts. Analogies of this “Great Lockdown” to the Great Depression and the Great Recession abound, but while we debate the politics of recovery moving forward, we sometimes forget that — in spite of those tragedies — we’re still here. We bounce back. There are good and bad ways to do so, and for the sake of our public health and sanity, we should aim for the best version of that future. We will eventually go shopping again without wearing nitrile gloves; it just won’t be — shouldn’t be — anytime soon.
For now, life remains sparse. The Bartender’s Handshake is still empty, robbed of its buzzy air. My apartment is a whisper of its former self. Traffic is a trickle. The world is still, and will remain, awfully quiet. No differently than when we were children lost in the dark, anxiety will follow us as long as we’re separated from the music of our lives.
We’ve no choice, though, but to accept this silence. Yes, it is a battle — an exhausting, drawn-out, mental battle. The most difficult kind. But if we’re not up to it — if we cave, if we return too early to cacophony — we’ll lose pieces of ourselves and people in our lives that cannot be recovered. We won’t recognize the noise of the world, because there will be noise missing:
Rational, thoughtful behavior.
Good ideas.
Voices.
