I had never noticed how loud cars are. The human ear adapts so quickly to the noise on a busy road that it had never bothered me—until I tried to listen to an audiobook on the go. Even with great noise cancelling earphones, the voice of the narrator barely stands out against the noise of cars driving by. The earphones need to crank up the volume to what feels like an order of magnitude higher for the narrator to be clearly audible. And that noise is there all the time. We just got used to it. I realized that the same goes for visual noise. As I type out these thoughts, I am sitting in my almost empty apartment in Munich, getting ready for my relocation to Madrid. Like with the earphones, emptying the apartment made me understand how much visual noise I was used to seeing every day. Now the space is void, and a surprising calm takes over me as I sit here. No more things to be arranged, kept, cleaned, or maintained—just space and serenity.

Imagine if streets were as noiseless as an empty apartment