I was walking through a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn with another parent I’d just met at a child’s birthday party. “I like it here,” he observed. “But the people smell bad.”

Hgst. Someone has commented on the odor of an entire people. A bad moon rose. Then another.

All around us were men in tzitzit, fedoras. I stabbed at the map on my phone. “I don’t smell anything,” I lied; the air was thick with the hot scent of political anguish. “Really?” he said. “Cigarette smoke bugs the shit out of me.” He pressed the heels of his hands onto his eyelids. I was in the company of an anti-Semite. I made my getaway.

The guy’s annoyance has annoyed me for a year. So I set out to win an argument with him—in absentia, of course. I read a Talmudic scholar on the subject of smoking and dug through data about cigarette use in the ultra-orthodox community. (Very low, at least in Israel.) But why was I even taking that dude, whom I never spoke to again, seriously? He was not annoyed by particulate matter. His issue was ideological toxins. Wasn’t it?

Annoyance is a maddeningly complex topic. We all lay claim to being annoyed so often that conversation seems to exist entirely to let us register how bugged we are. The office is too cold. Too humid. My coworker’s flip-flops slap against her soles. It’s gross.

But for all that people disagree—and bond—over what bugs them, it’s surprisingly difficult to define annoyance categorically. In Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us, Joe Palca and Flora Lichtman propose that an experience of annoyance implicates the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.

Indeed, for hard scientists to argue that annoyingness inheres in the world and not in the mind or the culture, they’d have to find aversive stimuli that are always aversive—though shy of painful. That seems challenging. Whatever the demonstrable state of that Borough Park guy’s corneas, if he didn’t have powerful cultural associations with both cigarettes (cool, uncool, carcinogenic, etc.) and tight-knit religious communities (heartwarming, repressive, interesting, etc.), he must have been living under a secular, smoke-free rock.

But negative stimuli do exist in the wild, and if we concentrate exclusively on language and power dynamics to understand what bugs whom, we might overlook the logic of the body’s sensations. Police sirens and children’s whines are annoying by design, so we get staked in silencing them. If you can block out these sounds, you may not just be tolerant; you might be irresponsible, or oblivious.

Cognitive scientists have a useful conceit for distinguishing two kinds of pain: clean and dirty. Clean pain is the kind all mammals experience—tissue damage, of course, but also the ache after the death of a mate or a child. Dirty pain is infinitely more common, and it shows up in humans. I’m an idiot for getting this sunburn. Why did my controlling cousin make me go to the beach?

With blame and indignation come new surges of cortisol that amplify—maybe even cause—physical pain. Shinzen Young, the mindfulness teacher, counsels dying patients to experience pain from annoyance to agony cleanly—with precision. It’s a challenge, but a liberating one: to resolve the pain by removing stories about who did what to you.

The reflex to find culprits—women, Jews—is a distinctly human form of insanity.

A parable about a sailor in the Zhuangzi, a Taoist text, also emphasizes the dangers of ladling dirty pain onto clean. “If he sees a man in the boat / He will shout at him to steer clear / If the shout is not heard, he will shout again.” But if “an empty boat collides with his own skiff, Even though he be a bad-tempered­ man / He will not become very angry.”

Which brings me to vocal fry, which has angered many a man, bad-tempered and otherwise. Vocal fry is a style of uttering words, characterized by a pattern of vibration in the larynx. No actual “fry” is present. A precise designation is “pulse register.” A positive one might be “vibrato.”


But this sensory experience has turned political. Some NPR listeners, who have complained bitterly about the pulse registers of female reporters, blame their intolerance on an “epidemic” and an “affectation.” In one male listener, the vibrato sound uncorked a torrent bordering on conspiracy. “Listen, I know there’s pressure to hire females—in particular, young females just out of college. And besides, they’re likely to work for less money. But do you have to choose the most irritating voices in the English-speaking world?”

Listen, as our sexist might say. I’m sure there’s a vibration that, even if made by a hawk, could be registered by certain nervous systems as annoying. I’m also sure that allergens exist. But the reflex to find culprits—women, Jews—is a distinctly human form of insanity. To go from an experience in the eardrums to a charge of hiring women because they’re easier to exploit is not just illogical, it’s malevolent.

We’re not all Taoists. (I’m still trying to win an argument with an absent person.) But to take up the challenge of separating clean from dirty pain is a small but meaningful step in reducing suffering generally—most of all our own. TL;DR: If it’s you who’s annoyed, stick to the sensations of the body without spinning tales of how Scott Pruitt or feminists caused your mosquito bites.

Virginia Heffernan (@page88) is a contributor to WIRED. She wrote about the elegant art of emoji in issue 26.07.

This article appears in the August issue. Subscribe now.

More Great WIRED Stories