Week 41/2025: Too loud
Week of 6 October 2025
It was a loud week. Too loud. I didn’t do much. Sometimes it’s good to chill a bit.
This post is wholly researched and written by me. I do not use AI in my writing. I will always bring you my stories in my real human voice.
It’s too loud
Tax time
My biggest achievement this week was finishing my tax return before the due date, which I believe is 31 October. It’s a lot easier to do online now than back in the early days of (I think it was called) e-Tax, which didn’t play very nicely with my Mac and I’d end up doing it on a paper form because online was just too difficult.
I think in a way, I haven’t got out of the mindset of ‘doing my tax’ being a half-day job that requires me to pull out boxes of receipts and statements, and I have to triple-check everything, and then double-checking the triple checks. The current online thing pre-fills most of my information and I keep a spreadsheet for everything else, so it should just be a matter of checking that what’s in my spreadsheet matches the numbers the tax office has, and adding in the things it doesn’t know about, like donations and my workplace deductions, and it’s done.
It probably takes less than half an hour but I’m so used to it being a huge slog-fest that when it’s done this quickly, it doesn’t feel like I’ve actually done it, so it feels somehow wrong to submit it and that something must be missing.
It can’t be that easy.
Anyway, I did it.
Yay.
(over) Stimulation
I struggled a lot this week with noise in a variety of settings. Staying up too late and not getting enough sleep is probably contributing, and that’s entirely on me.
I haven’t said much about the hearing device trials, which I started in June, so if you’re following along with that story, I was trialling hearing aids to see if this would make a difference to my sound intolerance. It was a bit of a balancing act because it was supposed to take the edge of sounds that hurt me but not damp everything so much that my brain thought I had (more of) a hearing loss and ramped up my tinnitus. I ended up going back eleven times to try different devices and different settings.
It was all very unpleasant.
The hearing aids didn’t make that much of a difference to the sounds that were distressing me, some of them made my tinnitus worse, and I found wearing them difficult, especially with glasses and even more so with a mask. The difficulty of keeping everything in place contributed to the stress I was already feeling over the noise.
So we agreed to discontinue the trial.
But it’s not always just sounds that do me in. Some days, too much visual stimulation hurts as well. (Open plan office lights, I’m side-eyeing you.) A prime example is this blue section of footpath on Collins Street
which I walked over on Saturday and it caused pain in my brain. I couldn’t walk on it.
I have no idea what this is. I imagine it’s something to do with the bike lane trial and enhanced pedestrian safety in this street. But it’s horrible.
Habit tracker
Existing habits
- Go outside first thing (7 days): 5/7
- 15 minutes morning exercise sequence (7 days): 4/7
- Hip exercises (5 days): 6/5
- Walk (7 days): 6/7
- Carry a notebook with me when I walk (6 days): 3/6
- Thinking time (4 days): 6/4
- Mid-day journalling (7 days): 0/7
- Walk 8,000 steps (7 days): 6/7
- 9.00 shutdown & dim lights (6 days): 0/6
- Evening routine (6 days): 0/6
New habits
- Set timer for morning planning (5 days): 0/5
- Work shutdown (5 days): 0/5
Summary of the week
Some positive things
I got my tax return done!
What did I learn this week?
Frankenstein
From my uni lecture, I learned that one of the first adaptations of Frankenstein for the theatre was in 1823 and it was a musical. Apparently, the theatre it was performed in only allowed ‘serious’ drama productions to be performed if they included songs and music.
And I’d thought turning anything into a musical was a recent phenomenon.
Daylight Saving
This weekend we switched the clocks forward to summer time, and this handy blog post from the Australian Writers Centre reminded me that is it officially “Daylight Saving Time”, not “daylight savings” or even “Daylight Savings Time”. Thanks, AWC.
Naked mole-rats
Okay, this freaked me out. I saw a photo of one of these creatures in the Mercury on Saturday and had to find out more.
It looks like an axolotl without gills and with teeth.
The BBC describes naked mole-rats as “weird, bald, subterranean rodents that look like sausages with teeth and can live up to 40 years”.
I imagined this was a gigantic beast but it isn’t. They’re only 7.5 cm long and weigh around 30-40 grams.
Amazing.
What did I notice this week?
I noticed magpies in my back yard chasing other birds away. This included kookaburras and green rosellas. The kookaburra incident was very dramatic. There were three magpies, and one of them was on top of the flying kookaburra as they chased it away. Then they stationed themselves on our and the neighbour’s roofs to make sure it didn’t come back.
Yellow posts at Dan Murphys.
The Hobart post office has cleared out all the shitty products they used to sell in the store.
I asked a staff member about this when I went to get the mail and they said Australia Post is returning metro post offices to be just post offices and basic stationery. Excellent news. It’s not such an overwhelming clutter and mess when you walk in there now, and the post office no longer looks like an “only on TV” ad.
What’s making me think?
Nothing to see here
This article from Julia Doubleday on Substack:
What’s odd about the political climate surrounding Forever COVID is that I really don’t see what the counterargument is against the idea that we should stop infecting children with a brain damaging virus. Reactions online seem to be simple disbelief that COVID damages brains- but this is anti-science. The science is clear. However, today we still have a hegemonic refusal to acknowledge COVID as a threat- from the far-right to the far-left, it is a largely united front to treat COVID as the cold it is so clearly not.
I mean, constant exposure to and infection from a brain-damaging virus combined with a relentless push to use Chatgpt and similar AI products for everything or risk being ‘left behind’—a technology that is wreaking havoc with our brains leading to cognitive decline and undermining our capacity to create and critically reason. Is this where we’re heading? Is this what we want?
Three or four hours
This is from Oliver Burkemann (author of 4000 Weeks):
It pays to use whatever freedom you do have over your schedule not to ‘maximise your time’ or ‘optimise your day’, in some vague way, but specifically to ringfence three or four hours of undisturbed focus (ideally when your energy levels are highest). Stop assuming that the way to make progress on your most important projects is to work for longer. And drop the perfectionistic notion that emails, meetings, digital distractions and other interruptions ought ideally to be whittled away to practically nothing. Just focus on protecting four hours – and don’t worry if the rest of the day is characterised by the usual scattered chaos.
What am I reading this week?
- Unsettled by Kate Grenville
- ‘The Little Governess’ by Katherine Mansfield
What am I watching this week?
- Resident Alien
- Doctor Who ‘Snakedance’
What am I listening to this week?
- Humanity Chapter 2 and 3 by Thomas Bergersen
About The Author
