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As a potential neighbor: no, it's not ok. If I can hear your music, you are intruding in my space. I need at least one place on the planet where I can get some actual quiet without earplugs.


I hear my neighbors all the time. They start up their cars, play basketball in the street, play music in their garage workshop, etc. There are myriad sounds that happen all day long when you live around other people. If you require silence then you choose not to live in a community.


Just because some noises are unavoidable doesn't make it less inconsiderate to knowingly inflict them on people. Music in particular has relatively long duration, is by nature harder to ignore than many of the incidental noises you mentioned, and is easily contained in headphones.

Your last sentence is a common fallacy: just because I pick a certain set of annoyances on a scale of trade-offs (in this case, the scale of living in an apartment to living in the wilderness) doesn't mean I am required to unquestioningly soak up all those annoyances. If that's your logic, you could never speak up about any problem you could in principle escape from, even if that escape would result in bigger problems. This "leave if you don't like it" approach to criticism, where leaving is very expensive and especially where the solution is very cheap, is also not ok (as it more obviously would not be ok in a political context).

I'm not asking for a lot. Just use headphones.




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