Sometimes I hear the people upstairs and then I think. “Wait. Hold on. I don’t live in an apartment complex anymore. Wtf is in the attic”.
Flipping racoons.
flipping raccoons
Cirque de Poubelle?
We can hear our neighbours fuck, they can hear us fuck. I used to hear the TV from the neighbour on the other side, until his mother died, now it’s really quiet from there. Kinda sad actually. I can also sometimes hear the kids from below us. I really don’t mind those human noises. It’s just part of living surrounded by other people.
Unless you’re my friend, whose neighbours are regularly loudly fighting at times of day where other people are trying to sleep. I’ve suggested slipping ads for therapy under their door.
If you have no morals, and if you’re in USA, you can give them ads for your local gun shop 💀
(/joke, pls don’t do this lol)
That’s savage.
I started making more noise after my neighbors clearly did not realize that the quiet they enjoyed from my apartment was out of deliberate consideration on my part, and not a mutual experience. I started with normal sounds like coughing or laughing or playing some music, but after that didn’t work, I started to make noises they would be embarrassed to ask me about. It somewhat worked at reducing their noise levels. I knew they heard me because they stopped making eye contact. But they were also awful people so that was fine with me.
Thankfully they moved and I now have a quiet neighbor who gets to enjoy my silence. Occasionally they’ll get a little noise from me to remind them that the wall between my bedroom and their main room is very thin, but I haven’t had to escalate it like with the last people, for which I am grateful. My other neighbors are a very quiet elderly couple and I love them, but our shared wall is substantially thicker, which is partly why I love them.
I would never interpret an uptick in noise from my neighbors as a message. I’m autistic and very unperceptive in this dimension so it may well just be me, but I think I’d start worrying about someone if they told me they thought that their neighbor coughing or laughing more audibly than usual was an attempt at communication.
Even the other sounds… maybe you got a new sex toy or developed an embarrassing medical condition. I’d just assume you’re doing your thing, not trying to weird me out.
The message was just “you can hear me” which I hoped would then logically translate to “therefore I can also hear you”. The normal kinds of sound just didn’t get the message across for some reason so I added the awkward element - it allowed for longer sound duration than briefly coughing or laughing, and made it more difficult to ignore. I’m pretty sure they thought I was just doing my thing.
It’s definitely a very oblique and passive aggressive approach to the problem, but it worked well enough that I didn’t have to go for something more confrontational, which would have been the next step.
I would get that message, but I’d probably assume that if you’re living in a shared building, you’re cool with sounds of other people doing their thing, have coping mechanisms, or will speak to me/write me a note (could even be anonymous).
Now I just hope my neighbors are and have always been assertive/aggressive enough to spell it out. Except for the upstairs adult neighbors who rollerbladed back and forth on their tile floor for a couple hours a week to build proficiency. I do hope they were constantly annoyed.
They were the only neighbors I’ve ever had to do this with after many years of apartment living. I am fine with normal sounds, but their noise far exceeded normal constantly, and I have an expectation that shared living needs to come with a level of consideration for others. I know it wasn’t just my problem either, there were multiple complaints made to the property managers by other apartments, to no effect.
I chose this approach intentionally to avoid confrontation with obviously aggressive and unreasonable people. They had a reputation for regularly screaming obscenities at each other and anyone else who displeased them. Knowing the exact content of all their arguments, I knew that normal human interaction was likely to direct their aggressive behavior towards me, which would not achieve my goal of sleeping at night.
I started to make noises they would be embarrassed to ask me about
Go on…
Im also intrested
I hear my neighbors yell from time to time but our kids are like 2 weeks apart in age and… We get it. We don’t do it, but we totally get it. And they tell me they don’t hear me singing in a silly voice when they must certainly do, and is perhaps embarrassing on the other end of the spectrum, lol.
We’re in a concrete building.
We hear noth-ing.
It’s gorgeous.
Except when anyone does any work on the concrete, anywhere in the building.
I’ve been in an apartment that was so quiet, we used to joke that we were the only residents in the multi story apartment block. And that people we crossed paths with in the elevators never actually lived there. They just rode the elevator up, then straight back down and left.
Do you also play hide 'n seek by closing your eyes to hide?
Lol, I thought the walls were more noise-isolating…
unfortunately, Bose did not make these walls
Like I don’t hear neighbors often unless I really put my ears close to the wall outlet and hear their tv on the other side…
The only time I heard it when the parent was yelling at their kid next door…
I remember living with a gf a long time ago. we were looking at new apartments and saw a review for our current one. this one review in particular mentioned our unit specifically and went something along these lines.
Place is great. pool is nice and clean, tenants are nice and mostly quiet and the rent is affordable.
to the couple in A1, everyone can hear you screaming. we get it. you like to fuck. also, please stop fucking in your living room with the blinds open, we can see you.
jokes on them, we were into that shit 🤣
We called the cops once (CPS told us to). Neighbor (single mom) was constantly yelling and swearing at her kids. And I do means constantly. We could hear her talking on the phone, so when she went ballistic even our cats were scared.
