If you hear a car alarm, you don’t immediately think, ‘Oh no, a car is being stolen!’ You likely believe the car was bumped accidentally in some way.

If you hear a fire alarm, you don’t immediately think, ‘Fire!’ You might smell for smoke, but your instinct will be that it is a false alarm.

If you hear a security alarm in a shopping mall, you don’t immediately think ‘Thief!’ You likely think that someone didn’t get the security tag removed from their purchase.

Police and ambulance sirens tell us to move out of the way, but they are going ‘somewhere else’. They are noisy inconveniences that slow us down or wake us up. We live in a world of beeping and wailing alarms. They lull and numb us to actual emergencies. An annoying tone at a doorway, that’s not a thief, it’s someone using the wrong door by accident, or someone holding the elevator door open for longer that it is meant to stay open. A security or fire panel droning on and on is an error, not a genuine concern.

If you were ‘alarmed’ for some reason 100 years ago, or for millennia before that, then that alarm was genuine! Dropping bombs, enemy attack, a fire, dangerous animals, threatening foe, dangerous terrain, unforgiving weather. An alarm sounded to indicate a threat or a real concern.

Now we trigger alarms all the time and our nervous systems have grown accustomed to responding without triggering genuine concern… but our senses are still triggered. Ever notice how much more annoying false alarms are when you are on vacation? We want to escape false alarms as much as we do any other parts of our regular lives.

I think we should seek ways to reduce the amount of false alarms we hear. I think that they are repeatedly adding to people’s anxiety and stress. We shouldn’t have to live in a world of constant false alarms.