To be fair, the Sony WF-1000XM3's are awesome and I love mine. Living in a big city is so much more pleasant with noise canceling. It can be surprising to take them off and realize how loud the environment around me actually is.

Lots of good things about the lockdown from the aspect of peace, quiet, nature, clean air, reduced light pollution, and more. It just comes at a cost that society isn’t willing to bear.

In LA, the city has used the downtime to ramp up road and metro construction, and buildings have been shooting up at a faster pace. I drove past one of the neighborhood pits that will turn into an apartment eventually and they had six excavators at the site all digging at once. Instead of road noise, now I get to hear drilling and hammering and dump trucks backing up and having rocks tossed into them at 7 am.