Solastalgia: When Home Sounds Different

Silence sells. As our lives grow louder, we buy quiet: silence retreats, noise-cancelling headphones, piano music. We flee from sound that literally makes us sick. Prolonged exposure to highway noise, for instance, raises our cortisol levels and earns the label 'slow killer'.

But the word 'silence' misleads us. True silence means dead life. Nobody wants to sit in an acoustically dead room. We want the forest.

When I cycle through the polders of my home region in Groningen, I miss sound. The sound of the many skylarks, for example, that were once as common as sparrows.

The Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined a word for this feeling: Solastalgia. It literally means 'solace-pain.' It describes homesickness for a place where you still feel at home, because the environment of your home has changed.

Perhaps solastalgia is the sound of our time. It's not about the silence we seek, but about the absence we feel. Such a term helps us acknowledge the loss, and in that acknowledgment lies the possibility of recognition.

The next time I cycle through the polders, I'll try to listen to what does sound. Maybe I'll even hear that single remaining skylark.

The world will never sound like it used to. But thankfully, it still sounds.