Sure, I had headphones as a kid, large and puffy, designed to allow me to listen to music in my room without blasting it all over the house. They were fine but I rarely used them because they truly shut out the rest of the world.
If Mom knocked on the door, I would not hear it. If the phone rang—they were on the wall in those days—I would be oblivious. So I gave it up and stopped wearing them. The cords broke easily. The fashion went away.
Putting things in one’s ears that emit sound has again become this odd cultural habit. It’s understandable given phones these days. You don’t want constantly to be holding it up to your ear, and you don’t want your conversations to be heard by all passersby. So you have earbuds and they are also useful for listening to music and podcasts and so on. I get it.
More recently, we’ve seen the ubiquity of large and ostentatious headphones, deployed as fashion statements and status symbols. People wear them everywhere. Some people never seem to take them off.
It’s exceedingly strange and somewhere disturbing and I do wonder what it all means. The masks have barely come off faces—there are still holdouts there—and now we have the popularity of ear masks that truly shut out the entirety of the audible world around the wearer.
Will we ever return to be just fine to go through lives as wholly attentive and open-source people again, with trust in ourselves and others?
To me, these headphones scream to others: “I hate you and everyone else and want nothing to do with this world.” It’s the ultimate demonstration of aggressive unawareness. These people are shouting that they only want to hear and know what they and they alone want to hear and know. It’s as if they don’t want to be part of the steam of normal life. They want to pretend to be somewhere else.
As I was typing those words from a chair at the airport gate, an extremely loud buzzer came on. It was so loud that it was painful. The headphone wearers did not notice while the rest of us sat there for 20 minutes while the buzz screamed at us for reasons that were unclear. No one seemed to know what to do about it. Not only that, no one seemed particularly concerned.
It sounded a bit like a fire alarm but we all instinctively knew it was not that. It was just a thing that happens.
Finally it went off and a pilot sat down next to me. I asked him about the loud sound. He said that it signifies that a door was closed improperly. I asked why it needed to ring out so loudly to everyone even though none of us could do anything about it. He laughed and agreed that it was dumb but that is how the system works. No one can control it.
It’s odd how filled our lives have become with strange and unavoidable beeps, buzzes, signals, and sounds of all sorts, all emanating from computers and all triggered by some event. When my dishwasher is finished, it beeps not once but fully 8 times. Why 8? It’s what the makers decided. The rest of us have to live with it.
The door beeps. The TV does too. Even the light switches in my hotel cough up some strange sound when turned off and on, and so does the coffee pot and the door, not to mention the elevator which positively aches with the desire to sound off at every conceivable opportunity. Everything that happens in the hotel offers a sound of some sort.
I’m sure that every mechanic who programmed all these things was proud to add a sound at every change. Maybe they sign their technology the way painters sign canvases, just leaving their mark on stuff to make it clear that they were there. The rest of us live with it forever.
We are all victims of this constant and unavoidable electronic symphony. Or really, I should say cacophony because it seems like no one thought about the implications of the whole and what effect it would have when interacting with other sounds.
As a result, we live in a world of unrelenting, seemingly random, and wholly inescapable rackets everywhere.
There goes another loud buzzer, higher-pitched than the last one and of a shorter duration. What did it mean? Someone surely knows but the question remains. Why must absolutely everyone be subjected to listening to a loud alarm that no one understands and about which all but a handful of people can do anything at all?
Why is the world set up this way? It seems like a huge mistake.
Of course, the airport is the worst offender by far. Announcements of various sorts never stop and the pauses between them are filled with jazzy saxophone music with an electronic drum beat. Is that supposed to relax us or fill us with a sense of fun? It doesn’t work. If you try to escape to a bar, it too is filled with loud music, on the presumption that we really have not heard enough of music from the 1980s.
Perhaps, then, it is understandable why people wear these “noise-canceling” earmuffs in the airport. This is truly a place where one wants to cancel all noises and plunge deeply into a world of isolation in one’s own solitary mental space while shutting everything else out. I get it, but it is still sad that this should be necessary.
To be aware of one’s surroundings and attentive to the signs and sounds all around is an evolved trait that was once rewarded. Now it is punished. We are rewarded instead for creating technological isolation chambers.
The airport is one thing but headphones seem to have become a habit of many people everywhere they go and included with everything they do. It is not only about wanting to shut off unrelenting beeps, buzzes, alarms, and notifications. It is about wanting to leave the world as we know it.
There is a feature of autism that is characterized by sound sensitivity. Maybe that is part of what is at issue here. The condition affects far more people today than it once did.
And yet there is surely more going on. Many people are still feeling broken from the mandatory isolation of 2020-2023 when our communities were shattered, kids were locked out of school, and we could not even gather in our worship communities of choice. We were told to treat others and ourselves as disease vectors, staying always six feet away.
The new golden age is said to be here but I have my doubts. Or let’s just say that it will be a long time coming. We’ll know that it is dawning when average people feel comfortable and happy enough to take off the masks, remove the headphones, put on something other than sweats and ripped jeans, smile and perhaps speak to others.
We need really to learn to live where we are—and make our spaces livable again—rather than always wishing we were somewhere else.
