You might hope that we would become habituated to reoccurring noises in our environment, but the opposite has been shown empirically. [1] The study showed that

You might hope that we would become habituated to reoccurring noises in our environment, but the opposite has been shown empirically. [1] The study showed that while regular office workers become habituated to office chatter after 20 minutes of exposure, their habituation resets to baseline after only 5 minutes of quiet (measured via memory tasks). The irregularity of the noise is what kills us. The only effective solution I've found against ambient ear-shocks is to overpower them via headphones and regular white noise.