Is my noise complaint self-actualization?

thoughts on inconvenience & interdependency

As I discussed in my last post, I like to throw parties. What I obscured is the controversy that often follows a good party. The real deal is I received a formal noise complaint after the Christmas party I threw in December. I was informed by my landlord, who, in turn, had been informed by the HOA.

The music was loud. Someone had turned up the bass, and people were crammed onto the balcony like sardines, shouting into the open, communal air. The last guests didn’t trickle out until 3 a.m. The complaint was more than fair. I was mortified to learn that I had upset my neighbors to the point that they felt compelled to go to an exterior authority.

I unplugged the Christmas lights (their presence was noted as an additional nuisance in the HOA email). I didn’t stay at my apartment for a few nights. If I could have shrunk to the size of a mouse and crawled into a hole, I would have. Then I thought …People are upset about Christmas lights??? If that’s the case, we might as well cancel all holidays. Turn off the lights. Never play music. Live in silence. Never create any sort of texture that someone might interpret as a bump. Make yourself smooth and seamless. If you need to express yourself, do it to ChatGPT, or if you’re really upset, express it to your HOA, never outwardly, certainly not to another person. Don’t do anything that might create inconvenience, discomfort, or friction.

Inconvenience, discomfort, and friction are the point. It is not physically convenient to put up Christmas lights. They add to the electric bill! They impose on the neighbors without their consent! Is it worth it to add a little twinkle to the neighborhood? I’d say so. It is special because it is inconvenient and unnecessary. We don’t have to throw birthday parties, hold graduations, commemorate anniversaries, or celebrate weddings. The easiest, most convenient thing we could do is nothing. Instead, we choose ceremony.

Thus I cycled through the following stages:

In addition to superfluous decor, inconvenience, discomfort, and friction are essential in relationships. Choosing to work through uncomfortable emotions with another person will often bring you closer, and despite countering hot takes of recent years, the “inconvenience” of picking up a friend from the airport or listening to them vent or cry is what gives those relationships their resiliency. Those actions remind us that we can depend on each other. They affirm our interdependency.

Interdependency feels critical to our current moment. I’ve been thinking more and more about what it means to live in a shared world and how to be a conscious, thoughtful participant in it. My neighborhood, at a small scale, is a shared world, and perhaps the one where being a conscious and thoughtful participant can make the most difference. If I want to foster good relationships with the people around me, I have to reckon with the fact that, in reality, by blasting music into the early morning hours, there’s a chance that I might be the asshole.

But I believe ceremony matters! I believe parties are necessary (again, see my last post)! So, how do we balance the inherent tension between believing that discomfort, friction, and inconvenience produce the frisson that makes life worth living while also buying into a shared code of neighborly respect?

A good baseline probably starts with ensuring that your actions do not impede others' ability to exist (basic human rights… you would think…). Beyond that, maybe it’s a matter of negotiation. I still believe that Christmas lights rock, a banger party is something people need, and those things are worth the inconvenience of a single loud night every few months, but if my neighbor needs a good night of sleep, say before a big test, that matters, too! I would reschedule or alter an event a hundred times over, no questions asked if I knew those were the stakes. Sometimes I should be inconvenienced. The trouble is there’s no way to know when to push and when to pull or how we might negotiate if we don’t have an awareness and understanding of each other’s needs. Needs themselves are ever-shifting creatures; to know someone’s needs, you have to have a relationship with them.

Part of my gripe with the noise complaint was that it was obliquely punitive and disconnected from anyone else’s reality. “Your lights are too bright, and your parties are too loud” doesn’t necessarily mean anything without a context. Had nothing else happened, I probably wouldn’t have thought about it again because the HOA is an anonymous, faceless entity, not a neighbor.

I’m still thinking about it because the night of the party, I did receive a text from a neighbor asking if I could turn the music down. While I turned it down, by that point, the party was a moving beast made by many, and I’m sure it still went on louder and longer than my neighbor would have preferred. For reasons I’ll withhold, I don’t think this interaction or neighbor was the source of the noise complaint (though even if she was, I get it, these are the systems at play and the standards of our time), but I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that she texted me. Here was a real neighbor choosing to engage and express needs that I was violating! I texted her again following the party to apologize. She was totally reasonable and forgiving, but we didn’t communicate again.

I want to know and understand other people, not so that I never step on anyone’s toes, but so that I can consider them. Consideration does sometimes mean putting bounds around the parties I throw, but it also can mean lending someone an ingredient or a tool. It means we can support each other. Sometimes that support is just making sure you’re quiet so that another person can get some sleep, but the more we choose to engage and get to know each other, the more resilient our community becomes. That’s interdependency.

Yesterday, I left the neighbor who texted a note and some pastries on her doorstep. She immediately texted to say she’d love to share a treat together at her place sometime. Society sets up systems to silo us, but we don’t have to follow the default. Given the opportunity, I think most people would choose a neighbor whose door they can knock on if they need something in the middle of the night over an HOA that makes sure no shrubbery is out of place, but you have to choose to be that kind of neighbor.