How to survive public spaces

A train carriage, a lamppost, and the modern art of going emotionally out of office.

I packed a book for a long work-related train journey, imagining myself a bit like a Victorian, calm and courteous, reading on the train and occasionally lifting my eyes to appreciate the views whizzing past.

I rarely take trains these days and I’d forgotten they are not monasteries. They are moving containers where strangers bring their whole day with them, including the bits that normally stay indoors.

I sat down, opened the book, and within minutes a man a few seats away fell asleep with his head on the laminate table, snoring so loudly it felt like the carriage had developed its own ecosystem. This was not gentle snoring but confident, industrial snoring, and I briefly wondered whether the train was running on electricity or siphoning power from his nostrils.

I tried to read anyway, holding the book like it might protect me. It didn’t.

You can look away from something, but your ears do not have eyelids. Sound enters you and behaves like it has squatter’s rights. This is why public noise feels so personal, because it is more than irritation, it is intrusion.

Erving Goffman wrote about the tiny rituals that let strangers share space without constantly negotiating reality. One of them is “civil inattention”, the small choreography where you acknowledge someone just enough to confirm they exist, then withdraw your attention so neither of you becomes a spectacle. It says: I will not demand your story. We can share space and still keep our inner lives intact.

Noise breaks that ritual because it forces intimacy without consent.

So I reached for the modern solution and put white noise on my AirPods, for the first time ever. My ears filled with a soft, featureless hush that dulled the edges of the world, and it worked instantly.

White noise is not music, which implies taste. It is not a podcast, which offers meaning. It is closer to an anti-world, what you choose when you cannot change reality and can only change your access to it. It is not just about sound. It is about opting out of the unwritten contract of shared space.

The snorer eventually woke and the engine-room racket stopped. I removed my AirPods, hopeful my Victorian fantasy might still be salvageable.

Then another man started playing music out loud from his phone, nodding along contentedly, as if the carriage had elected him Minister for Entertainment.

What startled me was not the music but his confidence. No glance around, no apology in his posture, just full possession of the air. For him, the line between private space and shared space had dissolved, which is its own kind of power.

I did look around, partly to confirm I was not imagining it, and partly in the hope someone else might say something. Nobody did. People stared at their laps and through windows. The commuter stare is the modern art of turning yourself into furniture so you don’t get involved.

And I felt the bystander’s bargain settle in, the silent deal where everyone endures the same thing because being the exception feels risky.

This is not always cowardice. You don’t know who you are dealing with. A polite request can escalate into an argument, a scene, or a viral clip, and then suddenly you are a thread, a headline, and a “friend of the family” explaining your tone. So again: AirPods. Fog. Out of office.

Later, relationship drama arrived, loud enough to punch through even that. A man was on the phone to his girlfriend, having an argument that was not really an argument so much as a long-distance court case, and I could hear her voice screaming down the line even though she was not on speaker.

She was accusing him of cheating. He was denying it with furious logic.

“How can I be cheating?” he kept saying, loud enough for half the carriage to become unwilling witnesses. “I’m with your brother.”

And he was. The girlfriend’s brother sat beside him, silent, with the expression of a man who has discovered that loyalty comes with the seating plan.

The call escalated, then ended. He hung up, exhaled, and turned to her brother like a colleague after a grim Teams call.

He paused with all the composure of a barrister preparing his final argument, then called her a f*****g b***h. The brother sniggered and joined in with worse names.

I had not bought a ticket but had a front row seat. And I felt intrigued, which is worse. I also felt a quick flush of shame at my own attention, because part of me was treating it like entertainment, as if the fact it was happening in front of me meant I was allowed to watch.

Some part of the brain predates manners. It hears accusation and starts scanning for threat, for who is safe, for who might explode, and it does it automatically, as if conflict is weather moving in.

So I put the AirPods back in, not just to block the sound, but to block the conflict in myself, my judgement, my curiosity, my irritation, my fascination.

White noise as a moral escape hatch.

That was the moment I realised I was not using white noise to help me sleep or focus. I was using it to help me tolerate other people.

Once you notice that kind of forced intimacy, you start seeing its cousins everywhere. Same pattern, different costume. Something gets planted into shared space, and everyone nearby is invited to react, whether they asked for the invitation or not.

Take flags.

Across parts of the UK, England flags and Union flags have been attached to lampposts and other street furniture, turning ordinary streets into a message. Some people call it pride. Others experience it as territorial marking, especially where it overlaps with arguments about migration, identity, and who a place is “for”. A lamppost is not your personal flagpole.

A YouGov poll published in late 2025 found that 50% of the British public thought people putting up St George’s crosses on lampposts and similar were doing so mostly to express anti-migrant or anti-ethnic minority sentiment, while 25% saw it mostly as national pride, and 19% said both equally. I’ve seen videos of people removing flags, with titles such as “he needs a beating”, and I’ve also seen council workers being surrounded and berated as they remove them.

You can argue about intention all day, but the effect is that shared space starts to feel like a test.

This is where the train comes back in, because the issue is not only the object itself, or even the noise itself, it is the way it occupies the commons. Something gets placed where it cannot be easily ignored, and then everybody nearby has to decide what kind of person they are going to be about it, and silence stops being neutral and starts being read as consent, or fear, or provocation.

Remember the bystander’s bargain? It’s back, not as a thought you announce, but as a posture you fall into.

White noise makes that posture easier to live with. It shields your nerves, it steadies your attention, it lets you remain physically present while going emotionally absent without leave.

But public spaces only work when people do tiny bits of maintenance, small corrections, shared glances, low-stakes bravery, and the quiet agreement not to treat them like stages.

When that maintenance stops, the silence is not peace, it is surrender. The loudest people dominate public life, not always because they are most numerous, but because nothing replaces noise except permission for it to spread.

Some people get louder. Some people get bolder. Everyone else learns the gentle art of disappearing.

White noise is a useful tool, and on the train I used it, but if muting becomes our full-time defence strategy, if disappearing replaces maintenance, we do not just lose quiet. We lose the social instincts that make quiet possible.

But the antidote is not louder confrontation.

It’s small, boring courage, the kind that does not go viral. The glance that checks you are not alone. The shared eyebrow that reminds you that you are allowed to want the commons to feel common.

Sometimes, when it is safe, it is the simplest sentence delivered without theatre, like “mate, could you use headphones”, or “excuse me, would you mind taking that call a bit quieter”, and then stopping, and letting the ordinary norm do the work rather than your personality.

Sometimes you will decide today is not the day, because courage is not the same as recklessness. But if we never do it, we should not be surprised by the world we get.

Public life turns into a contest between performers and ghosts, between people who take the space and people who leave it.

And the rest of us vanish, not dramatically, not nobly, not even angrily.

Just very efficiently.

One AirPod at a time.

Or, in some cases, two. Because let’s face it: the brother joined in.