Cacophony of self-obnubilation

One evening during my last summer trip to Orizaba, my family and I were trying to enjoy a nice goodbye gathering at a local downtown café when we suddenly found ourselves having to raise our voices to the point of yelling so as to be able to have a coherent conversation over a pair of very loud restaurant speakers. Of course, the place was full of equally loud voices, which taken as a compound, created a highly boisterous cacophony that I supposed would have been enough to convince any bistro manager to turn the devices off. To my dismay, this did not happen, instead, the pseudo-musical nuisance continued. My increasing frustration prompted me to ask the establishment keepers to turn the volume down. I remember the visibly upset frown in the waiter's face when he learned of our petition.

It is quite sad to realize that this experience was not unique nor unusual. Instead, our hyper-commercialized societies seem to have normalized the stridency of night-time ambience. It seems to be the case that now people attend these places to be purposefully drowned in a sea of noice that allows them to dissociate from themselves. When I reflected upon this, I remember feeling some sort of nostalgia for a time where I could sit a café and read, or simply observe my surroundings and reunite with my own thoughts. I couldn't help but to think that we are now losing the ability to savour the simple joy of just being.

More recently, I encountered an interesting passage by Gabor Mate where he ponders on this exact same phenomenon. He suggests that "awareness of the moment has become something to fear". Late capitalism creates a chasm between us and the present, and this gap is then filled with the boisterous products of consumer culture. We don't have to be concerned anymore about noise blocking our inner voices. There is nothing more to listen. It's been lost! And what is now missing, Gabor quotes the Polish-born writer Eva Hoffman, is "nothing more or less than the experience of experience itself. And what is that? Perhaps something like the capacity to enter into the textures or sensations of the moment; to relax enough so as to give oneself over to the rythms of an episode of a personal encounter, to follow the thread of feeling or thought without knowing where it leads, or to pause long enough for reflection or contemplation". Ultimately, Gabor forebodes, "what we are distracted from is living".