There are days when I look forward to winter. Not because I dislike summer, but because winter finally brings back peace and quiet. For months, our town has been virtually turned inside out: endless construction and renovation noise as single-family homes are torn down and replaced by three-story new builds, accompanied by a DIY crescendo of lawnmowers, chainsaws, leaf blowers, and drills. The soundtrack to this orchestra of noise is provided in the background by mobile discos with bass boxes turned up to eleven, dog owners who believe that training only works by shouting, and children next door who spend hours practicing counting on a bouncy castle – and unfortunately start over at three. And should you actually hear birds instead of an angle grinder for two minutes, someone is guaranteed to decide that the lawn desperately needs mowing.
Sometimes I get the impression that Germany is just a dress rehearsal for an end-of-days opera. It's the cacophony of the present – each one an instrument, together an unbearable orchestra. And as an encore: those contemporaries who let their cars idle while they wait, who shout across three freezers in the supermarket to ask if there's any butter left at home, or who olfactorily devastate half a region with a single cloud of perfume. One wants to shout at them: "You did it, you have our undivided attention!" - for exactly two seconds, until the next nuisance tunes their instrument.
Why do we put ourselves through this - and above all: Why do we participate without recognizing our own contribution? Psychologically speaking, noise is a primal signal: "Attention! I am here." Even small children learn that screaming has an immediate effect - it makes them unmistakable and thus visible. As adults, we merely vary the means: lawnmowers instead of screaming, angle grinders instead of drums. In social psychology, this is referred to as the struggle for scarce attention: whoever wants to be noticed resorts to exaggeration. One drowns out, another outshines, a third out-perfumes. Noise is not only to be understood acoustically - gaudy clothing, aggressively styled cars, or the infamous cloud of perfume also belong to it. This behavior is amplified by the logic of social density: the closer we live together, the greater the need to differentiate ourselves. Silence hardly works there because it gets lost in the background noise. So the signal is amplified - at any cost. The result is a kind of "acoustic capitalism": the loudest wins.
Sociologically speaking, this reflects an overwhelming experience with modernity. We live in a society where everything happens simultaneously: work, leisure, consumption, education. Everyone claims space, everyone wants to be seen, heard, felt. The quiet self-evidence of the private sphere has long been lost. Instead, there is constant self-staging - be it on social media, on the street, or in the supermarket. Noise becomes a performance instrument: the leaf blower signals that someone is working here. The boombox in the sunbathing area indicates that someone is celebrating (themselves). The flashy outfit: someone wants to be seen here. The cloud of perfume: someone was here. Social noise becomes a status marker, an admission ticket to the perception of others.
Descartes' famous "Cogito, ergo sum" - I think, therefore I am - has long gone out of fashion. Today the motto is: "I make noise, therefore I am." Because whoever makes no noise is not noticed. And whoever is not noticed does not exist. Thus, every silence becomes suspicious: Is someone sick, weak, or - even worse - boring?
But precisely therein lies the paradox: In a world that is constantly noisy, the true provocation is silence. Not the shrill appearance, not the all-encompassing cloud of perfume, but the quiet presence. Transferred to the choice of perfume, this by no means means inconspicuousness or even irrelevance, but rather restraint: Clear, not overloaded, yet with an aura that acts like a statement. An inner radiance, a whispering authority that needs no noise. It is precisely these perfumes that appear as a counter-proposal amidst the din: they whisper - and yet they are heard.
Perhaps this is the true art of the present: not to be the loudest, but to use one's own quiet presence with the courage to leave gaps, so that one remains unmistakable. Just like the perfumes in our selection - all with an inherent, quiet presence that nevertheless stands out.
