A Modest Proposal to Solve the Problem of All that Noise

I’ve begun reading through Mesopotamian mythology in the last few days to finally read and remember—the number of words my eyeballs had glanced over without retaining their meaning when my ADHD was unmedicated is stupendous—the Gilgamesh Epic. I’m reading Stephanie Dalley’s Myths from Mesopotamia, which includes supplemental myths beyond Gilgamesh, one of which is Atrahasis, or The Flood¹. Atrahasis is, as near as we humans can tell, the earliest recorded Flood story in the world; archaeologists have found tablets containing broken fragments of the myth dating from the early second millennium B.C.

Genesis tells us, “The LORD saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth” ² and resolved to reset humanity with the Flood. What possible reason would the gods have for killing off all humankind in Atrahasis? Why, sensory sensitivity issues of course!

600 years, less than 600³, passed

And the country became too wide, the people too numerous.

The country was as noisy as a bellowing bull.

The god grew restless at their clamour,

Ellil⁴ had to listen to their noise.

He addressed the great gods,

“The noise of mankind has become too much.

I am losing sleep over their racket.”

Atrahasis

I assume the neurotypical reading this is thinking something like, “Honestly, there is never a good excuse for genocide.” To which I would strenuously object⁵!

As a neurodivergent man with both ADHD and autistic traits, there are moments when the auditory input becomes so overwhelming that, without my stimming⁶ readily available, I would instantaneously and without remorse authorize the death of every human on the planet to end the cacophony. Don’t get mad at me! I’m not the one making all that racket and bellowing like a bull; you are! The great Anunnaki—greater gods—and their offspring, the Igigi—the lesser gods of the world’s first union, which you can read about in the footnotes—are, I’m sorry to write, entirely correct here, and humankind is wrong.

Less satirically, auditory sensitivity is burdensome for me in two ways:

1. Hidden loss of concentration affects me in ways that aren’t fully realized until hours later.
2. Self-shame over the feeling that I must “hide” from sensory input. No amount of therapy will permanently revoke the intermittent mixture of sadness and shame at the existence of a seedbed within me that allows this brokenness to blossom (this is despite undergoing a borderline miraculous therapeutic experience).

The first is a productivity concern. To help manage my ADHD and executive functioning issues, I make detailed lists early each morning of what I need to complete. This includes Saturdays and Sundays as well. This list gets translated into calendar entries that fill up my entire day: forty-five-minute segments for walks, thirty minutes to read this book, twenty minutes to play a video game, fifteen minutes for baths, forty minutes to handle a technical task for work, endless Microsoft Teams meetings. Sudden sounds like a dog barking at a delivery driver, a banging on the door to the office, a raised voice in the office adjacent to mine, or even—worst of all—the ringing PING of a text or Slack message, can break my concentration and unsettle me emotionally for a few minutes. These breaks in concentration add up over the day, which leads to a blown schedule, which leads to feelings of inadequacy that I cannot finish what I need to complete—inadequacy and its ugly cousin shame are two emotional hallmarks of an ADHD-afflicted person’s inner life—which inevitably ends with me being in a foul mood at the end of the day. There are far too many days when I could have starred in a Marvel movie as the latest and greatest threat to life on earth with my superpower: “irascible and crotchety dad.”

The second reason—self-shame at feeling unable to handle what others seemingly can do with little to no effort—is most notable with my children. My kids (ages 10 / 7 / 5) are the greatest gift God has given me. They are also my sworn mortal enemies, capable of dealing immense psychic damage to their long-suffering father through the insidious act known as “healthily playing with each other.” The laughs, screams, giggles, and triumphant yells as Link vanquishes Ganondorf⁷, or as my girls run through the sprinkler, or as a pair of kids is finally caught in a tag by the third, are all the joyous sounds of a peaceful childhood. These are also the sounds that often bring a physical reaction from me: a twitch of my shoulder, a violent shake of my head as if I had been slapped by an invisible hand of noise, and even a full body convulsion that requires me to grab my desk and breathe deeply for a few moments to resettle myself and assure my mind that everything will be OK. The shame I feel when my inner dialogue begins complaining about my children’s happiness is difficult to bear.

This is not an abstract or infrequent thing; this past weekend, needing to complete work pushed off by the long Memorial Day weekend, I struggled through an hour-long task for multiple hours before finally abandoning it in a mutant combination of grumpiness and dejected guilt. My children’s monstrous crimes? Playing on a slip-and-slide outside on a Sunday afternoon before being too loud while cleaning their rooms. Real dad-of-the-year stuff, eh?

To help combat this issue, I wear earplugs the majority of the workday when I am not on calls (my current job as a tech exec requires me to be on calls 4–6 hours per day, so I spend at least four hours a day with cheap foam earplugs in my ears). I will often wear them in the early evening as well during the witching hour–that ninety-minute frame at the end of the day consisting of tired kids, dinner, baths, chores, and bedtime that feels like Frodo trying to summit Mount Doom every evening–if I am feeling punchy that day. This creates its own set of tradeoffs to consider:

1. Placing an additional workload on my spouse as I cannot hear the requests (they always feel like ungrateful demands at the end of the day, don’t they?) of our kids
2. Missing out on the rare kind comments between our children that keep a parent moving forward
3. Worst of all, I cannot shake the feeling I have put an unhealthy fear into my children that dad cannot be bothered with as he has his “quiet ear pods” in.

So, yes. I empathize with the Mesoptamian gods who desire nothing more than a bit of tranquility so they can focus and get some well-earned shut-eye. The mass genocide of most of humanity via a terrible global flood to reduce the decibel level may seem a bit harsh. Still, I would comfort you with the words of Shrek’s Lord Farquaad: “Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.”