misophonia
Article
misophonia is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 19, 2025 and May 14, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “noise is annoying but nothing more … misophonia”; “The condition this reminds me of, more than any other, is misophonia . Misophonics - and I say this as one of them - are angry”. It most often appears alongside /r/atheism, /r/childfree, /r/fuckcars.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: March 19, 2025
- Last seen: May 14, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- atheism (1 shared issues)
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- childfree (1 shared issues)
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- fuckcars (1 shared issues)
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- petfree (1 shared issues)
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- Asterisk (1 shared issues)
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- belief networks (1 shared issues)
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- Cognitive behavioral therapists (1 shared issues)
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- cynophobia (1 shared issues)
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- Donald Trump (1 shared issues)
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- DSM (1 shared issues)
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- Eaton (1 shared issues)
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- homophobia (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Jake Eaton has a great article on misophonia in Asterisk.
Inline links: a great article on misophonia
Misophonia is a condition in which people can’t tolerate certain noises (classically chewing). Nobody loves chewing noises, but misophoniacs go above and beyond, sometimes ending relationships, shutting themselves indoors, or even deliberately trying to deafen themselves in an attempt to escape.
So it’s a sensory hypersensitivity, right? Maybe not. There’s increasing evidence - which I learned about from Jake, but which didn’t make it into the article - that misophonia is less about sound than it seems.
The condition this reminds me of, more than any other, is misophonia.
Inline links: misophonia
Misophonics - and I say this as one of them - are angry. As I discuss in the link above, the anger seems more characteristic of the condition than the sensory sensitivity. If they go deaf, they’ll still be angry that people are making the noises they hate, even though they can’t hear them. Confronted with the noises they hate in a context where they don’t know it’s the noise they hate, it won’t bother them. I think of misophonia (again, explained at the link - the rest of this post won’t make sense without it) as a superstructure of anger/trauma/phobia/rumination built on top of a foundation of otherwise-non-disabling noise sensitivity. This isn’t to belittle misophonics’ problems - they genuinely hate the noise exactly as much as they say they do, and there’s no way for them to “turn it off” or “just get over it”. But the condition only enters full bloom when you take it from the neurological context of noise to the social context of people making noise.
Inline links: trauma
I think when you have something you get exposed to every day, plus starting variation in which things mildly annoy people, you have the opportunity to get the kind of cloud of mutually-self reinforcing triggers and automatic negative thoughts that sustain a misophonia-like condition. Then, depending on their levels of intellectualization and paranoia, some people will develop broader theories of why they’re right to hate these things and their all-consuming unhappiness accurately reflects an all-consuming evil in society. It’s a miracle that the /r/petfree people haven’t developed some word that cashes out to basically meaning “the petarchy”.