It’s really interesting to realize how much humans are products of their environment.
I know that there is still a long-standing debate on nurture versus nature.
However, I can tell you that a lot of our behaviors were determined by early events in our life that we might never understand. Unfortunately, a lot of the same behaviors are reinforced overtime until we are only functional under a certain set of conditions. This is what I’ve realized in my own life, especially when it comes to indoor air handling devices and air quality. When I was growing up I came from a pretty typical family. We had a modest home with a central heating and cooling system that works well enough to maintain our indoor air quality without driving up incredibly high energy bills. That being said, the air conditioning unit and forced air furnace definitely made an excessive amount of noise whenever we were using the air quality control systems. I remember many nights of listening to the air conditioning unit until I would drift off to sleep when I was a kid. I never realized that this relying on air conditioning background noise would stick with me for the rest of my life. To this day, I cannot sleep at night without a high quality indoor air handling device nearby. I want to hear the comfortable home and thump of a modern cooling system so that I can drift off to sleep easily. As you can imagine, this HVAC necessity is a big issue considering my career as a field medic in third world countries.
