Dwain Northey

Does anybody else need noise all the time just to keep themselves company against their own thoughts?

I don’t even mean music necessarily. I mean background noise. Familiar noise. The kind of noise that doesn’t ask anything of you. A TV show you’ve seen a thousand times. Cartoons rerunning in the background at two in the morning. The same episodes of The Simpsons or Family Guy or Futurama playing on a loop not because you’re actively watching them, but because silence somehow feels louder.

I can’t sleep in silence. I’ve tried. People talk about peace and quiet like it’s this luxurious thing, like silence is supposed to be calming and restorative. To me it feels deafening. The second the room gets completely quiet, my brain apparently decides this is the perfect opportunity to replay every regret, every anxiety, every unfinished thought, every weird hypothetical argument from 14 years ago that no one else remembers but somehow my brain preserved in museum-quality detail.

And I honestly don’t know if this is common or if we’ve all just quietly agreed not to admit it.

Because I look around and it seems like everybody has some method of drowning out their own internal noise. Some people drink. Some people smoke weed. Some people scroll TikTok until their eyes stop focusing. Some people bury themselves in work. Some people need podcasts constantly playing. Some people can’t drive without music. Some people can’t shower without YouTube in the background like they’re afraid to be left alone with themselves for seven uninterrupted minutes.

Maybe all of us are just trying to lower the volume in our heads long enough to breathe.

For me, it’s background television. Cartoons especially. There’s something comforting about hearing familiar voices and predictable jokes. No emotional investment required. No surprises. Just noise. Warm, familiar noise. Like having company without the exhaustion of actual social interaction.

And lately, this blog has kind of become another version of that.

An outsourced conversation with myself.

I write these things because if they stay trapped in my own head too long, they start echoing. So I throw them out into the void hoping maybe someone else reads them and says, “Yeah. Me too.” Not because I need solutions. I’m not even sure there is a solution. I think sometimes people just want confirmation that they’re not uniquely strange for existing the way they do.

Because I don’t think I’m uncommon.

I think there are a lot of us sitting alone in our homes with televisions running in empty rooms. Sleeping with sitcoms playing softly in the background because silence feels emotionally unsafe for reasons we can’t fully explain. Keeping ourselves surrounded by noise because if everything gets too quiet, our thoughts suddenly stop being thoughts and start sounding like a crowded room we can’t escape.

Maybe that’s modern life. Maybe that’s anxiety. Maybe that’s loneliness even when you technically aren’t lonely. Or maybe human beings were simply never designed to sit in complete silence with unlimited access to their own consciousness.

All I know is this:

If I wake up at 3 a.m. and the TV shut itself off, I immediately notice it. The silence feels wrong. Heavy. Like the room changed shape while I wasn’t looking.

So I turn the cartoons back on.

Not to watch them.

Just to know I’m not sitting alone in the dark with my own head.