I don’t know about rich people, but mental health and intelligence both love quiet. People who are all right in their heads don’t need to drown out with din the unbearable affects that gush out of them like geysers. And if they have interesting thoughts they want to concentrate on, they’ll have no need of filling an inner vacuum with noise.
Intelligence Loves Quiet
Clarissa's Blog 
https://x.com/AuronMacintyre/status/1801812113322582020
Also, the author is inadvertently making the point that assimilation is futile. Even when admitted into elite spaces, “Xochitl Gonzalez” will always feel oppressed by the fundamental characteristics of what makes those spaces elite and desirable.
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The preference for peace and quiet is not a “rich people” preference, it has more to do with your intelligence and the culture you belong to, but of course the Atlantic will never say this, so they try to frame it as an Occupy Wall Street-style narrative. That dog won’t hunt!
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I grew up in a house with a library atmosphere. And I have re-created that in my own house.
Have never understood the desire to live in a place with “nightlife”, the constant company of a television, or even the need to play music while going about one’s daily routine. It’s so overstimulating.
But from knowing people who enjoyed all of those things… I suspect it comes from a deep fear of being alone with one’s own thoughts.
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Nice twitte comment.
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I lived in that neighborhood for a couple years up north– on the other side of a townhouse wall from a young couple with two kids. Nothing like lying awake at 2am wondering if you should call the cops, or if they’ll guess it was you and slash the tires on your roommate’s car. I mean, he was either gonna kill her or not. Zero chance she would press charges or kick the loser out.
We go to some effort these days to avoid sharing walls with anybody.
Being poor in a rural area is way, way nicer than being poor in the city: neighbors are far enough away that 1) you don’t have to hear them most of the time, and 2) when their meth lab blows up, it doesn’t damage your house. When you can avoid the constant noise, it’s amazing the incidental stuff you can get used to: feral pigs, escaped pitbulls, roaming meth dealers, cops chasing people through our yard, trash fires that become wildfires. Except for the meth dealers (regular as clockwork, but they mind their own business), that stuff doesn’t happen every day, and sometimes it’s kind of fun. That neighborhood had a very exciting late night police chase about once a year, due to the setup: one road in, gps said it connected to the highway on the other side but it didn’t, they’d roar in there thinking they could lose the patrolman, and you could hear them going up and down the dirt roads. We’d all go out on the porch to watch, it being a safe distance from the road 🙂 Neighbors all reporting what street they’re on, on the neighborhood FB group… I’m still a member of that FB even though we moved away a couple years ago, because it’s so great.
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I remember sitting down at my kitchen table with a cup of tea, looking outside and seeing a pimp point a gun at two prostitutes. I froze. Then the police arrive, the pimp starts running away in the direction of my apartment building, somebody starts shooting, the prostitutes shriek. And I’m completely frozen even after shots are fired. Can’t move.
Not feeling nostalgic about that at all.
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D:
So far we’ve lucked out on the up-close-and-personal stuff like that. When we moved into our current house, I found a homeless hoard in the back corner of the yard. Started hauling the junk out and putting it in the trash can, until I uncovered the layer with the pill bottles and broken glass tubes with melty sooty stuff on them. At that point I badgered the landlord into cleaning it up, since it was there before we were, and maybe hazardous to the half dozen neighborhood kids who regard our yard as a public playground (I encourage this: it means I always know where my kids are). We’ve had three bikes stolen, and some tools out of the truck. Last week four cops came blazing up our dead-end street and everybody (we and all the neighbors) stuck their heads out the window to see whose house they were at. But they were looking for a runner on foot, and nobody had seen him. Probably hiding out in the school grounds.
Old neighborhood was shooting all the time, of course, but… rural shooting is different 😉 Mostly just people plinking at cans. You can tell by the intervals. Sometimes it was us. Also a hunting lease down the road. Nothing to worry about.
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It’s hard to think in crowded places where
Loud music, squeals, and clatter fill the air
And brainless persons holler “Yo!” and “Hey!”
That’s why “idea” is found in “hideaway.”
-Richard Wilbur
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I love quiet and wearing earplugs at the office. But I also have intelligent friends who play music at their houses all the time and are OK with noise at work. If anything, I’d say they are more intelligent than I am since they don’t need silence to concentrate.
The world is more complicated and less black-and-white than you think.
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