On March 12th, 2020, the NBA suspended their season. Days later, our production of the TV show Coyote, starring Michael Chiklis, would be suspended too. Luckily for us editors, we were able to take the footage home and continue cutting. By even more luck, we just moved from an apartment to a house. It wasn't a purchase, it was a just rental, but it didn't matter, living in a house made all the difference.

For the previous ten years, I had been happily living in different apartments, from Montana, to all over New York City, and then all over Los Angeles. But in early 2020, I was less happy about it.

In the apartment complex I lived in before moving to the house, I would get woken up by a strange, persistent humming vibration that would last around 30 minutes. I've learned that this type of vibration doesn't bother everyone, but it does bother HSPs: Highly-Sensitive People. People who are more introverted tend to be more sensitive to outside stimuli. If you are like me, I hope to articulate the hidden costs of living in a psychologically unsecure environment.

For me, that barely noticeable vibration was enough to wake me up and prevent me from going back to sleep. It was strange, but vaguely familiar. What the heck was it? I was losing hours of sleep each night and performing worse at work. Multiple times I would angrily storm the apartment complex in my boxers around 3am trying to locate the source of my growing madness.

Eventually, I discovered that it was from the apartment across the hall, where the guy there was doing his laundry. That's why the cadence was familiar; it matched our own laundry machine. I left him a ridiculous string of sticky notes (the length of a CVS receipt) kindly bringing attention to my plight and pleading with him to consider doing laundry at a different time—while acknowledging he had every right to do what he wanted. Basically, my peace of mind was being held hostage simply by another person's desire to have clean clothes!

It amazes me that the 3am Laundry Guy wasn't even sharing an apartment wall with us. The vibrations from his laundry machine had to move through his wall, across a carpeted hallway of ten feet, through my wall, up my bed, and to my pillow!

That's how infrasound works: slowly but powerfully. That's how the volcanic eruption of Krakatoa could be heard thousands of miles away in China. Infrasound in cities is a major problem that almost no one is talking about.

When I returned in the evening, I saw my sticky notes attached to my front door—along with a few of his own. He empathized with my plight, didn't take it personally, and agreed to stop doing laundry at 3am. This is such an idiosyncratic example, but it's just one of countless issues that come from living in an apartment: a lack of a psychologically secure environment.

That's why, when we moved to a house, it wasn't to start Linking Your Thinking; it was to live in a space that, for lack of a better phrase, was more "psychologically secure". This reason wasn't voiced out loud at the time, with such clarity, but that was the underlying reason.

The hidden value of a house isn't financial, it's physical.

In first few months in the house, I just couldn't believe how much I was missing out on in the past 10 years. Don't get me wrong, I loved learning about the world and hopping around through different experiences in different locations and apartments. But this house...finally, my mind had the space to create! To put it in simple terms:

Had I not moved into a house, Linking Your Thinking would not exist.

I'm not here to say if you should or shouldn't buy a house, but the financial arguments drown out an equally important conversation about the ability to protect the mind from unpredictable infrasonic attacks.

This is even more true for highly sensitive people, which is a term that seems to describe introverts (and ADHDers) who might be more affected than others to the starting of Dodge Charger engine at 6:03am and the infrasound it attacks with—penetrating not just the ears, but the body.

This may seem idiosyncratic, but I am 100% certain that any other HSPs (highly-sensitive persons) are vigorously nodding their head in agreement, and I want to give a voice to them.

If you think you might be overly sensitive to infrasound, I encourage you to do whatever is in your means to improve your living situation. You likely don't even realize the chronic nature of it. Once you experience a situation with less invasive infrasound, you might (like me) experience a Cambrian explosion of creative enthusiasm and peace of mind.