Longing for peace and quiet / Fed up with city life

[KingCrimson]

Hello everyone. I am looking for your advice today on a matter I've been preoccupied with lately.

I have always been a rather introverted person, preferring alone time over social activities most of the time. I spent the first 18 years of my life growing up in a really small village on the countryside (barely 200 people). Leaving the house all I had to do was walk 100 meters and I was already in the forest all by myself. Great place to grow up as a kid, but a terrible bore as a teenager.

At 18, I moved to England to pursue my first degree, and while the new surroundings took some time getting used to, I still enjoyed everything the big city had to offer, going out with buddies to drink and chase pretty girls at bars etc. I couldn't have imagined going back to that boring old village with nothing to do.

Over the past few years however there has been a big shift in my preferences. My desire to go out to bars or clubs is pretty much zero. I don't care about going to the cinemas, to restaurants or whatever entertainment the city has to offer anymore. All I seem to long for is some peace and quiet. Tranquility. Silence. I am only 28 years old, yet in this regard I feel like I resemble a 70+ year old. I have attributed this partly to getting older, however peers my age don't seem to share this longing.

I get irritated more and more by city life. Cars and everything related to them annoy me: The noise, the stench, the honking, the squealing wheels of aggressively driven vehicles, the sirens of police and ambulance. Bikers who seem to be under the impression that they are participating in an endless "Who can make the most noise?" competition annoy me. Dudes who delight their surroundings with their trashy gangster rap and rave music at max volume annoy me. People screaming like madmen in the middle of the night like they want to kill each other annoy me. People smoking at the entrance to the subway leaving their cigarettes on the floor even though the ashtray provided for by the city council is literally right next to them annoy me. Crammed trams, buses and subways annoy me. Constantly being approached by marketing people wanting to put their unwanted flyers into my hands annoys me. Buildings and poles plastered with advertisements screaming for my attention annoy me. Stage Orange culture all around me annoys the shit out of me.

Sometimes I feel like these feelings are unwarranted. Reading the rant I just wrote makes me laugh at my pettiness.  I live in Vienna after all, arguably one of the most beautiful places to live as far as bigger cities are concerned. It is comparably small, quiet and clean with a lot of parks and surrounding forests. It is still very different from living on the countryside, but come on. Should I really be this fed up? Could it be that the silence and tranquility I'm longing for is actually the kind that is found within me rather than the one in my external environment?

I noticed a change in the music I prefer to listen to as well. As a musician I have over the course of the years developed a pretty eclectic taste ranging from rock and metal to jazz to electronic and classical music. However, over the past two years or so I find myself listening pretty much exclusively to tranquil ambient music. As of late, even that has become too much for me most of the time, and I seem to prefer listening to nature sounds instead. This is another thing I couldn't have imagined only a few years ago.

I am dead set on leaving the city and moving to the countryside as soon as possible. A small house in the middle of nowhere with nothing but fields and forests around me. The chirping of birds greeting me in the morning. Fresh air filled with the scent of flowers. Taking long walks and riding my bicycle around the countryside. Sadly, this is not an option right now, as I have yet to finish my second master's degree and create a means of making money for myself that does not require me to live in a city. I'm confident that I will be able to make it happen, but it will probably be a few years still. Until then, I need to look out for other solutions.

There are a few things I have already done to remedy the issue somewhat. I have invested in a good set of noise-canceling headphones and quality earplugs and don't know how I ever managed without them. I spend a lot of time at the local parks reading and meditating, however, there's always so many people there making noise, blasting music through bluetooth speakers, and the traffic noise is never drowned out completely. It is hard to find a spot where one can actually be completely alone. Another thing I have taken up which helps is doing regular solo retreats at a monastery in the countryside. However, I enjoy my time there so much I dread going back to the city again.

What are your thoughts on this issue? Have you had similar experiences? Do you think moving to the countryside would be merely an escape, just like it is no solution for a person who is lonely to “fix” their loneliness by getting a spouse or keeping busy with social activities? Do I simply need to keep up my daily yoga and meditation so I can enjoy the quiet spaces within me no matter how noisy my environment is? Or is it just a matter of different strokes for different folks? Maybe city life is just not for me (anymore)?

I appreciate you taking your time to read all of this, this text turned out much longer than I had anticipated. Thank you in advance for your responses and have a lovely day. 

[Recursoinominado]

I grew up in a large city and lived there all my life. I am also ultra-introverted, can go long stretches of time alone and in the city I was longing for some quite time. Last year I said fuck it, and went to a more isolated villa in the middle of a beautiful valley in my state, spent q month there and loved it. Decided to drop everything to live in a place like that, ended up in a small villa at the beach with 1000 people max, the lifestyle is completely different and, 5 months later, I decided to go live in a even bigger city than the one I lived all my life, this is because i came to the conclusion that my biggest goal right now is to build my career and my online business and i it is better to meet and live with people that are vibrating in that frequency. Here is almost like a paradise and people tend to get pretty lazy and a little too comfortable, smoking weed, socializing, going to the beach and working only enough to be able to keep this lifestyle forever. I don't want this and in a big city, this is possible. This city is São Paulo, in Brazil (comparable with NY), it is known by this fast rhythm of work and abundance of opportunities, there is also a lot of parks and cities near by i can go and chill for a while. There is, for instance, a beautiful vipassana center 40 min away from the city i could go anytime i want.

You can find peace in a city if you chose the right one, but it depends a lot on what are your priorities. 

If you don't know yet, i suggest you to take a leap of faith and i guarantee you will find out. 

[BlackMaze]

I had to move to another country in a small city having lived most of my life in a big city. I still love the city that i left but i also experienced some of the things you mentioned. Moving to a small city definitely calmed me. I think the environment you live is very important for your psychology and loud noises continously are the worst. I would still prefer to go back to my city if i could but maybe this is because i grew up there. Maybe you prefer a quite place to live because you grew up in one. 

[peanutspathtotruth]

@KingCrimson Your experience very much sounds like what I‘m going through. It‘s so funny, I‘m exactly the same with the music: for 2-3 years only ambient music, and recently more nature sounds than actually music. And music had always been an important hobby for me. 

The difference is, I grew up here in this big city (Berlin), so I don‘t know anything else. But it must be 10 years now already since I feel and actually express to others that nature and silence is calling me. @Recursoinominado You also make a great point, for first there is a need for building a career, and for that a city is (in my case) preferable.

But in the end, I see no reason, if you are financially settled, to go out into nature. That‘s very likely to be my path as well. Listen to your heart <3 
(By the way, thanks for the recommendation, going to get these noise canceling headphones asap!)

[Mrs_C]

I was thinking of this here:

What makes us search may not be the beginning of our story. Since we are searching for something we are part of a beautiful transition. Within this beauty we all too often put focus on what we want to find. This may not be the end of our story. Just put focus to play. This way we will find more than we thought. Silence lies in between. And from there, music will arise.

Silence can only be found within the noise

Cheers
Mrs_C

[KingCrimson]

Thank you very much for your comments everybody. I found them all quite interesting and helpful in their own way.

@Recursoinominado
Thank you for sharing your experience. Interesting food for thought. Taking a leap of faith and just trying it out seems to be a good way to go. I might just end up like you and moving back to a bigger city again after all, who knows?

@BlackMaze

On 8/2/2020 at 1:10 AM, BlackMaze said:

 Maybe you prefer a quite place to live because you grew up in one. 

That's one of the thoughts I had as well. Sort of like an anchor effect. There are many stories where the main protagonist goes off to an adventure and then when they get old they return and settle down where they began their journey. However, I'm a bit young for that. I wouldn't want to live in the exact village I grew up in either. Most of the people there are very conservative and some of them can be quite nasty. Thankfully my parents were among the few progressively-minded people there (mostly Stage Green). As long as it's on the countryside, I could imagine living anywhere, be it in Austria, any other European country or even the US, although my feeling is that I prefer the European way of living. Can't really say though because I have never been to the US. Something I want to do in the near future though. I really want to experience culture in the US because they exert so much influence on all other countries.

@peanutspathtotruth

On 8/2/2020 at 0:37 PM, peanutspathtotruth said:

@KingCrimson Your experience very much sounds like what I‘m going through. It‘s so funny, I‘m exactly the same with the music: for 2-3 years only ambient music, and recently more nature sounds than actually music. And music had always been an important hobby for me. 

The difference is, I grew up here in this big city (Berlin), so I don‘t know anything else. But it must be 10 years now already since I feel and actually express to others that nature and silence is calling me. @Recursoinominado You also make a great point, for first there is a need for building a career, and for that a city is (in my case) preferable.

But in the end, I see no reason, if you are financially settled, to go out into nature. That‘s very likely to be my path as well. Listen to your heart <3 
(By the way, thanks for the recommendation, going to get these noise canceling headphones asap!)

Wow, that's actually insane! Wouldn't have thought that anyone would have undergone the exact same transition music-wise. Let me know how this evolves in the future, will you?

In case you haven't bought some noise-cancelling headphones yet, I want to help you with which ones to buy as I've done a bit of research. I found that the two best ones available currently are the Bose QuietComfort 35 and the Sony WH-1000XM3. The Bose are more comfortable to wear, the Sonys have the better sound. As a music producer I value high quality sound, but in this case I actually picked the Bose because they are just way more comfortable to wear, which I feel is more important on the road, and the sound is by no means bad. However, all these consumer headphones have really exaggerated bass. People who don't know anything about music are impressed by loud bass frequencies apparently. When I put them on for the first time I was actually shocked, I thought I had to give them back because the bass was so terribly loud, not a smooth frequency curve at all. This is easily fixed though by applying some EQ and turning down the volume on the low frequencies. I suggest you do that. 

@Mrs_C

This is a beautiful comment. I think I get what you're trying to hint at. Thank you. A bit unrelated, but it reminded me of this great quote by John Cage: "Music is the silence between the notes."