"It's just background"

Much of the fill isn't listened to. The radio in the kitchen, the television on in the room where nobody's watching, the playlist during work. It's background. It isn't taking anything from you because you're not attending to it.

Erin Westgate and Timothy Wilson, in 2018, set out a model of boredom that's useful here. In their account, boredom is what you feel when your attention isn't successfully engaged in something you value. The mismatch can go two ways. Understimulation, where there's not enough to engage with. And overstimulation, where there's too much, or it's too demanding, and attention can't settle. Boredom, on this model, comes from both, and the second is the one that a filled life produces without noticing.

The hum is a demand on attention. A radio talking in the kitchen is a voice, and voices pull at the part of the mind that processes speech, whether or not you've decided to listen. A television on in the room is movement and faces, and the eyes go to it. You're not attending to the hum. The hum is attending to you, in small tugs, all evening, and the result is a person who's slightly restless without knowing why, in a room that never quite goes quiet.

This is my reading of the model rather than a finding from it, and I'll say so. But it explains something that filled people describe, which is being tired in the evening in a way that doesn't match what they did, and being unable to settle to anything in a house where something is always on. The hum feels like nothing and costs something, and the cost is attention paid in pieces to a thing you didn't choose to hear.

Background television deserves a paragraph, because it's the largest hum in most houses. A programme nobody is watching is a fill for a room rather than a person, and it does to the room what the podcast does to the walk. Conversations happen over it, and are shorter for it. Children learn that a room has a screen on in it. And nobody can say, at the end of the evening, what was on, which is the sign that it was hum and not a chosen thing.

The method doesn't ask you to switch it all off. It asks you to notice which of the sound in your day is being listened to and which is hum, and chapter 21 is about keeping the first and letting the second go quiet.