27 ms·

The AirPods Effect

• swesour 4mo ago
  Walking around cars or in cities, especially in New York, is incredibly loud. The ANC protect my ears on the subways and streets.
• walth 4mo ago
  Come to the Midwest. Over friendly. Zero air pods effect.
• chadgpt3 4mo ago
  I started using them recently but I already wasn't talking to strangers for a long time before that. I suspect the constant stimulation suppresses the default-mode network, the idle wandering your mind normally experiences when you're doing nothing. Before that, I'd sometimes hold my phone up to my ear to listen to a podcast (even on the subway at minimum volume) but it was awkward so not ubiquitous. I think buying a paid of wireless earbuds was one of those decisions that made my life subtly worse overall, like eating a whole tub of ice cream.
• MBlume 4mo ago
  I'd much rather be surrounded by people wearing earbuds than have people watching tiktoks through their phone speakers on the subway
  • pb7 4mo ago
    Coincidentally, the latter increases the number of the former. Most people are going to avoid confrontation and instead opt for their personal noise cancelation.
    • mciancia 4mo ago
      > Most people are going to avoid confrontation Yeah buying airpods seems like better idea than being stabbed/beaten up
  • nozzlegear 4mo ago
    That just sounds like another version of what the author is talking about: using [device] to avoid human interaction.
    • walrus01 4mo ago
      In a really big and busy city it's emotionally exhausting and not reasonable to have an interaction with everyone near you. The only way a lot of people can tolerate being packed into busy public transit systems on a daily basis is to intentionally ignore each other to a certain degree. It's essentially the same unspoken etiquette rule as what you're socially expected to do if riding a crowded elevator. Go commute by NYC subway 10 times a week, M-F especially during peak tourist season and you'll understand. I intentionally behave completely different if I'm in a small town of 3000 people or walking down the street, shopping, riding transit in a large city.
      • tcoff91 4mo ago
        100 years ago they sold pocket sized books so people in cities could ignore each other by reading books.
        • walrus01 4mo ago
          Also there's plenty of old timey black and white photos of people riding the LIRR or similar where everyone is holding and reading a newspaper.
          • jagged-chisel 4mo ago
            Ah, it’s reading that’s the problem. Plato/Socrates/Thamus was onto something!
      • HDBaseT 4mo ago
        and people still try and suggest public transport is great, when its a hellhole..
  • misiti3780 4mo ago
    those are just people with bad manners.
  • TiredOfLife 4mo ago
    There is an even worse thing. Using speakerphone while on street, while holding the phone near ear anyway.
• lorecore 4mo ago
  > People now wear their AirPods all day at the office. They keep them in while ordering and paying for things in stores and supermarkets. I wonder how people do this or if my ears are just shaped weird, because I can’t even sit totally still at my desk without them falling out.
  • nsagent 4mo ago
    Get the new Powerbeats Pro 2. Nearly identical in functionality to Airpods, but they have ear hooks as they are designed for sports.
  • Balooga 4mo ago
    Uh oh. You could be genetically predisposed to have to listen to everyone's problems.
  • chihuahua 4mo ago
    There's a pretty big difference between AirPods and AirPods Pro. The former just sort of loosely sit in the outer part of your ear. The latter form a pretty good seal in your ear canal. That's how you get good noise cancelling with Airpods Pro. The loose fit of the regular AirPods and the wired EarPods never made any sense to me.
    • inigyou 4mo ago
      my $9 wired earbuds from Sony also form a good ear seal by the way. No need to buy the $250 (!) thing from Apple. Unless you don't have a headphone jack. I've used these to sleep to podcasts or quiet music at music festivals, and they block out the music from outside pretty well. This is because of the flexible rubber seal. My wireless earbuds are hard plastic all the way around and sit (securely) in my earlobes while my wired ones actually go inside my ear canal.
    • josephg 4mo ago
      Yep. The pros also come with a bunch of different silicon ear tips to fit a range of different ear canal sizes.
    • 4mo ago
• tptacek 4mo ago
  I don't remember any time in my life where it ever felt normal to me to randomly talk to strangers. I went to London when I was a teenager and was made uncomfortable by how chatty the cab drivers were. Later, I worked at a startup and my boss was preternaturally gifted at chatting up strangers, which he did habitually in every setting we were in when we traveled; on the plane, on the bus from the airport, &c. I remember feeling like he was a freak of nature. And I'm not an introvert! All of this long predates Airpods. I think this is a cultural difference, not a technological shift.
  • haaz 4mo ago
    as someone who enjoys talking to strangers, while it is less common in some countries like China, and big cities in most countries, people tend to react mostly the same.
  • dav43 4mo ago
    My take, is that this effect has removed a lot of the micro communications we make - not necessarily random conversations. It’s taken away random moments that may trigger a short small conversation with strangers. In part it’s taking away the shared experience in public and making it “my” experience.
    • garrickvanburen 4mo ago
      Whether grocery shopping or an endurance running event (5K+) those with any kind of headphones in are simply less aware of the people trying to get around them.
      • bombcar 4mo ago
        I heard they're thinking of putting cameras in the AirPods - so we'll just add collision avoidance (and backup alarms).
      • skywhopper 4mo ago
        The folks without earbuds who park their grocery carts diagonally across the aisle while standing in the remaining empty space disagree with you.
• micromacrofoot 4mo ago
  I actually use AirPods to assist my hearing in loud environments, but this aside... I think there's also the consideration of: how often have you really wanted a stranger to talk to you on the bus. I've talked to a few women about this, and they don't leave home without headphones because it gives them an excuse to ignore strangers hitting on them in public.
• righthand 4mo ago
  Phones/Screens and headphones are being optimized to blind you and deafen you from the real world. You dont care though because it creates a pseudo-safe-zone through social status signaling (look at my expensive headphones in my ears, I look so cool and technologically advanced!).
  • ryukoposting 4mo ago
    I see people walking around with airpods in and all I see is that dude from 2010 with the shaved head, Oakley sunglasses, and one of those Jabra single-ear Bluetooth things.
• shevis 4mo ago
  > Heavy headphone use makes people feel lonelier, the survey found. Correlation for sure, I’m less sure about causation though. It seems equally likely to me that other factors are driving increased social anxiety/isolation which in turn drives people to wear headphones to avoid social interactions.
  • AussieWog93 4mo ago
    I'll chuck autism and overstimulation in there too. There's a reason that there's the stereotype of the autist wearing their noise-cancelling headphones.
    • wolvoleo 4mo ago
      Yes and they are a great help. Even though I'm AuDHD (and more ADHD than Autism in that) I do appreciate the silence when I feel like it. I use them more with just noise cancelling on than I do with music. And never ever podcasts, I have zero patience for those.
  • basisword 4mo ago
    >> It seems equally likely to me that other factors are driving increased social anxiety Social anxiety thrives on avoidance. It's a feedback loop. So likely it's correlation + causation. Your anxious so you wear the headphones to block out the world which only breeds more anxiety.
  • DanHulton 4mo ago
    > Correlation ... causation Yeah, I'm surprised this isn't highlighted more in these comments. "A small study" and "an article" and such seems to be the basis for this article, and yet there's seemingly no work done to identify if it's actually that people's attitudes have changed, and they're adopting headphones because of that. It's not as if there's been major, literal earth-changing events that happened in incredibly recent memory that might have changed how people socialize or interact or anything, right? Let's just blame a specific brand of a piece of technology that has existed for decades, instead.
• hydrolox 4mo ago
  looks like the seashells of Fahrenheit-451 were inevitable
  • nytesky 4mo ago
    A friend of mine from back home mentioned he hadn't heard anything about the White House UFC fight because he's solely focused on himself right now. Honestly, I think that’s becoming ubiquitous; all of us are navel-gazing and trying to "optimize" looks, diet, exercise, Ai skills, supplements. We can sit through four hours of a Joe Rogan podcast, there are so many long form podcasts! We are all just living inside our own little bubbles now.
• ryukoposting 4mo ago
  I didn't realize that research on this topic was so sparse, I just took it as a fact that people wearing airpods don't socialize in public. When I was in college, the line "he can't hear you, he has airpods in" was a meme. It was used as a jab at someone who wasn't paying attention because they had wireless earbuds in. So I know I'm not the only one who feels that way.
  • jagged-chisel 4mo ago
    I have a hard time understanding someone so oblivious as to need telling not to try talking to someone with earbuds in. You can see them. Don’t talk to me. If you must, get my attention first with a wave or something - don’t touch me.
    • dingaling 4mo ago
      Do you apply this rule in reverse? If you need to speak to someone who isn't wearing earphones, do you wave at them first or do you just start talking to them? I suspect the latter.
      • satvikpendem 4mo ago
        One can hear, the other can't. So not sure how that's a reverse rule at all, it's actually the same rule applied to the reverse situation. The reverse of the rule would indeed be talking to someone without earbuds in.
      • jagged-chisel 4mo ago
        I use a verbal cue to get their attention before diving into my question, because their ears can hear me. In any case, you need to wait for people to register that they need to change contexts before engaging them. Where did you find the three dollar discrepancy? vs. Hey, Barb. <wait for acknowledgement> Where did you find the three dollar discrepancy? With earbuds or headphones, the method of attention getting has to change: something they can see (wave), or something they can feel (tap the desk, no touching them.) Ultimately the point is you get their attention, then you engage with the subject. If you're oblivious to the fact that there's an audio barrier sticking out of their ear, don't be surprised when you get no response.
• trhway 4mo ago
  When Walkman came out: https://www.freethink.com/consumer-tech/sony-walkman-technophobia https://www.freethink.com/consumer-tech/sony-walkman-technop... "Some said it was a sign of a continued rise of Reagan- and Thatcher-style individualism. Cultural critic Allan Bloom deemed the Walkman “a nonstop…masturbational fantasy” in his 1987 book “The Closing of the American Mind.” Neo-Luddite John Zerzan saw the Walkman as part of a modern trend that encouraged a “protective sort of withdrawal from social connections.” Thomas Lipscomb, chief of the Center for the Digital Future, equated it with the euphoric drug “soma,” from Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” creating, as he put it, “an airtight bubble of sound” that was nothing but a “sensory depressant.” ... The Walkman, critics claimed, was more than just music to one’s ears. It was a tool of societal disconnect ... " Personally i wear AirPods only in one ear - don't want to be struck by anything i didn't hear coming, and that also doubles the battery time.
  • Petersipoi 4mo ago
    > don't want to be struck by anything i didn't hear coming Airpods Pro with transparency mode is the best for this
    • trhway 4mo ago
      I don't in general trust the tech, saying that as someone who programmed computer the first time in 1987 :) And having music in both ears, nice stereo, etc., definitely decreases situational awareness even if the outside sounds come through fine.
• kylemaxwell 4mo ago
  Eh. I'm autistic and audio overstimulation is very real for me. When out at a restaurant or similar public place, I often have my AirPods in with nothing playing, just noise cancellation. I can still chat with my wife or whomever is with me and hear them, albeit muffled, but it keeps everything else down and manageable. Perhaps I could get some of those Loops, which I understand are less obtrusive.
  • jorisw 4mo ago
    I don't know that I'm autistic but I've grown very sensitive to nuisances over the years, which is why I wear them any time I'm not with someone I know. I use the Background Sounds feature on the iPhone, set to Dark Noise, in public transit if there are loud people nearby that my music isn't drowning out. Recommend trying it out. There's a Control Centre shortcut for it too (with an ear icon).
  • wolvoleo 4mo ago
    Yeah I use them for that too. I use loops a lot in clubs etc and people sometimes comment on them and I explain and they're fine about it. I can hear them better anyway and I have some degree of hearing damage so I prefer them in for protection in those cases.
• ActorNightly 4mo ago
  > Americans are speaking to one another far less than they used to. According to that study, the number of spoken words uttered by the average person fell by 28% between 2005 and 2019. Each year during that time period, the number of words people spoke in an average day declined. I wonder what the difference is between this, and culture in EU where small talk isn't really a thing.
  • jvican 4mo ago
    The EU is large and most importantly very diverse. Pretty much all the West and South of Europe has a very strong small talk culture. You shall not stereotype a country, and even less so a political and economical union of countries.
    • galleywest200 4mo ago
      The US is larger than Europe and importantly very diverse, a melting pot you could say. You will find people in the South are far more talkative than people in the Northwest. The “Seattle Freeze” is real and I believe that it does not exist to the same extent in the South.
      • renjimen 4mo ago
        Just pop over the border to Canada from Washington state and they thaw right out! Also, nit, but Europe has ~2x the population of the States, and definitely more cultural and linguistic diversity.
      • watwut 4mo ago
        They all talk or at least understand English. The cultural exchange between Spain and Hungary is much smaller. Or France and Poland. And historical shaping is much different - they did not went through the same dictatorships and same wars.
    • wolvoleo 4mo ago
      And within those regions it differs a lot too. Here in a big Spanish city you would find very little too, especially in summer when there's so many tourists.
• comrade1234 4mo ago
  Do tattoos too. American living in Switzerland and it's shocking when I go back.
  • sejje 4mo ago
    What are the social effects of tattoos?
    • stavros 4mo ago
      Too much beautiful art walking around.
    • weberer 4mo ago
      If you go to Japan, they won't let you enter most onsens. You see a lot of one star reviews from angry tourists who didn't know ahead of time.
      • throwaway2037 4mo ago
        For many onsens, this rule died in the last five years of the tourism boom. Also, many young Japanese people in big cities now have tatoos. As along as your tats don't look "too Yakuza", you will be fine. Also, many conservative ones have changed to allow you to wear a small elastic band of material to cover them. Also, many onsens have the option of a private bath that you can rent for an extra fee. Even the conservative ones don't care if you have big tatoos in a private onsen.
  • wolvoleo 4mo ago
    Ohh I love tattoos, as long as they are arty and not gaudy. Most people here in Spain have beautiful tattoos <3
• k2xl 4mo ago
  "You Can't Miss It" https://k2xl.substack.com/p/you-cant-miss-it https://k2xl.substack.com/p/you-cant-miss-it
• Barbing 4mo ago
  I’m so with you, thanks Markham!
• tines 4mo ago
  > Americans are speaking less and less to one another. The number of spoken words uttered by the average person fell by 28% between 2005 and 2019. Is it just me or does anyone else turn skeptical when seeing these precise numbers given to something that seems essentially impossible to measure with this accuracy?
  • projektfu 4mo ago
    That's the central measure of 338 fewer words per day, but the 95% confidence interval was 25–652 fewer words. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916261425131 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916261425131 There is an interview with the authors here: https://phys.org/news/2026-04-people-spoken-words-year-years.html https://phys.org/news/2026-04-people-spoken-words-year-years...
    • projektfu 4mo ago
      I should add, 338 fewer words per day per year, cumulatively 28% fewer. It's a little clumsily written.
• Mistletoe 4mo ago
  All my co-workers wear those and I hate it. Any attempt to talk to them about work or personal subjects means they have to hit their ear and pause it. It just makes me want to say nothing.
  • jwrallie 4mo ago
    That could be an advantage if your work requires some kind of sustained concentration, for the other party at least. I like using by headphones (which are big and over the ears) as a way to signal when I’m on concentration mode and don’t want to talk, but I do that maybe 30-40% of the time.
  • satvikpendem 4mo ago
    That is by design, so they are not interrupted by random coworkers.
    • Mistletoe 4mo ago
      Well we are a science lab and need to constantly communicate about work so that’s not good.
      • satvikpendem 4mo ago
        There are better ways to do that than interrupting someone in the middle of flow.
• PaulHoule 4mo ago
  Kinda funny but I think this situation is less bad than it was a year ago. For a while it seemed like young people were hard of hearing like the elderly, somebody would be camped in a weight machine at the gym resting for 30 minutes and I’d have to stick my hand in their face to get their attention or they’d be walking down the street and I couldn’t warn them about hazards on the sidewalk. Maybe it just doesn’t bother me anymore or maybe they’ve wised up.
• karpovv-boris 4mo ago
  I did notice the self-isolation effect of wearing any headphones a long time ago. Now, after a few years of using AirPods and finally switching back to cheap cable headphones only for work calls, it actually helps a lot for my brain to register context changes much more easily. And if you have adhd I highly recommend trying to do the same.
• alberth 4mo ago
  Tinnitus I swear my tinnitus is a result of use of AirPods. I never wore any type of earphones ever. Then started using AirPods for calls, during workouts or on a plane. A year later I developed tinnitus and the only thing that changed in my life was wearing AirPods. I’m no doctor, and who knows what caused my tinnitus. But it’s irreversible. I constantly hear a humming ring now and it’s super distracting, especially trying to go to bed. I’m no doctor. But heads up for those who haven’t used inner ear headphones.
  • teruakohatu 4mo ago
    > I swear my tinnitus is a result of use of AirPods. Have you had your hearing checked out by an audiologist? Any hearing loss? Hearing loss (age) and damage (loud noise) are the most likely culprits.
    • alberth 4mo ago
      Yes. Checked out twice. No hearing loss at all. My hearing is actually better than age appropriate, so the doctors say I’ll just have to live with it because they can’t detect it.
      • danaris 4mo ago
        You should look into notch therapy apps—I have some very mild tinnitus that flared up into moderate tinnitus for a couple of months last year, so I was looking for options and found that there were some that looked promising.
        • tentacleuno 4mo ago
          What was your experience with them?
  • yesitcan 4mo ago
    You forgot to mention the part where this happened recently. You’ll habituate soon and forget about it. Source: got bad tinnitus from motorcycling, became depressed with suicidal ideation and then got over it.
• 9x39 4mo ago
  I didn't fight a culture change in our work dynamic as we went from an extroverted office to a mostly headphones-on culture where people would even sometimes type instead of talk in certain meetings. In the end, I don't think it mattered except that resisting change and insisting on my way could have (would have) backfired. Didn't see any data in the article, not that I disagree, yet what if AirPods allow a return to normality for those who wish to have some distance? Maybe everyone's just had to put up with extroverted norms until AirPods and mobile phones came along. Q: Do you consider yourself more introverted or more extroverted? 9% Completely introverted 29% More introverted than extroverted 31% About an equal mix of extroverted and introverted 15% More extroverted than introverted 7% Completely extroverted 9% Not sure n=1000 2023 YouGov internet poll https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/rwpllcwimy/Introverts%20and%20Extroverts_poll_results.pdf https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/rwpllcwimy/Introverts%20and%20Ex... Also, Susan Cain's book Quiet claimed 1/3 to 1/2 of the population are introverted. (Who knows)
• cadamsdotcom 4mo ago
  To me it’s just a proxy for the amount of economic activity in a place. Every time I go to Melbourne airport in Australia, I’m shocked that nobody - nobody - has their laptop out. In Sydney a few people do. But go to any airport in the US and if not a majority are on laptops at least a large minority seem to be.. So yes - airpods in ears, laptops in airports, city lights at night. Just a sign of how plugged in everyone is to “something” that’s happening.
  • inigyou 4mo ago
    Not all activity is economic activity and not all economic activity is valuable. People outside the US aren't generally expected to work 24/7
  • hug 4mo ago
    It's totally incorrect to state that the area served by either Sydney or Melbourne airport has less economic activity than the area served by "any airport in the US", or even the vast majority of US airports, so whatever laptops-at-airport (and I suppose airpods-in-ears) is a proxy for it sure isn't economic activity.
• groan 4mo ago
  Lack of shared values and things to bond over.
• SpyCoder77 4mo ago
  Public, not pubic > I felt like half the people around me in pubic had some kind of device-connected earwear on their head.
  • CompoundEyes 4mo ago
    Not if they’re listening to Bush
• lograv 4mo ago
  This sounds sad to say, but I went on a walk outside, my AirPods died and realized I hadn’t listened to the outside world in a long time. Was a nice reminder to take a breath sometimes and enjoy the world. I think we all forget that
• try_the_bass 4mo ago
  The thought of intentionally deafening myself to the outside world, even partially, is unnerving, because I can't stand the thought of nerfing my own situational awareness to that degree. Especially in fast-paced environments, like city streets, where sounds can carry such important signal. Even watching someone else walk around a city with headphones/earbuds in is something that makes me uncomfortable by proxy. It's like someone deciding that walking around with beer goggles is a good idea
  • number6 4mo ago
    They have a situational awarenes mode
  • parodysbird 4mo ago
    I live in cities, and I usually walk around 15-20k steps every day for the last decade in cities. I listen to music or podcasts in my earbuds, and often I read stuff on chat on my phone as I walk. I have never run into anything, and never had any issue bumping into people or cyclists. It's perfectly possible for some people to navigate just fine in their environment while dealing with multiple stimuli, and in fact that's exactly why I love walking so much more than sitting. Having earbuds or using my phone at the same time for me is certainly nothing like being intoxicated while walking. It's important to not project one's experience as how it must also be for everyone else.
    • basisword 4mo ago
      You think you do. You're just not aware of how many people are dodging you to prevent collisions :)
      • parodysbird 4mo ago
        No I also dodge, because I glance around the entire time I do things. I have ADHD. I feel more comfortable having continual tasks and stimuli, so looking both way, glancing at who's around, pressing the button for crossing the street, these are part of the background pleasure. You don't have to share my experience, but the difference is that you deny mine can exist, whereas I am perfectly fine understanding e.g. the autistic person who also posted about how they wear earbuds to use ANC because noise disturbs them. You are not granting the same consideration about how other people experience things differently.
• hirvi74 4mo ago
  [dead]
• crote 4mo ago
  A lot of women wear headphones / earpods without playing anything on them. It is a great way to stop men from trying to flirt to you, as you've got a convenient excuse to just completely ignore them! And the lack of music is for the same reason: you need to be aware of the men trying to harass you.
  • junto 4mo ago
    Came to say the same. It’s a very useful tool to stop having to deal with being bothered by strangers whilst I go about my day in public spaces.
• korginator 4mo ago
  The noise levels everywhere in our cities overwhelms me. The constant chatter of people all around, e.g., a loud conversation in close proximity, people blasting some TikTok garbage on the train, or someone approaching me trying to sell me something when I'm simply walking - I'd rather avoid all of this. I'm usually playing dark noise on noise cancelling earphones most of the time, and that helps me tune out the constant, stress inducing bombardment of unwelcome auditory inputs.
  • wolvoleo 4mo ago
    You make a very good point I didn't yet think of. Usually if someone tries to talk to me on the street it's something bad. A scammer, a thief, someone with those stupid clipboards trying to collect money for a cause. Some political campaign. It's rarely something positive.
• sublinear 4mo ago
  If you want that warmth, you have to invite it in. It has nothing to do with the airpods. Do you ever sit somewhere in public fully relaxed without a care in the world? Do you ever poke your head up to see who else is looking at what you're looking at? Is your expression neutral or natural? There's always someone nearby doing the same. What happens when you spot them? Don't overthink it.
• jorisw 4mo ago
  > Where I live, in southwest Germany, AirPods are far less common. FWIW I live in Amsterdam (also western Europe) and anyone in the streets under 50 is wearing them, myself included. > They keep them in while ordering and paying for things in stores and supermarkets. As a GenYer I find this rude and I'll take them out any time I interact with someone. My point being that their ubiquity doesn't have to mean people being rude or indifferent to eachother. I think people have the right to choose comfort and focus, anywhere outside of a conversation with another person.
  • camillomiller 4mo ago
    >> As a GenYer I find this rude and I'll take them out any time I interact with someone. Interesting point. Airpods actually work great as hearing aids and I personally use that in loud environments, but I find myself cringing when I do because exactly of what you say. So maybe normalizing their use even when interacting is fine? Still, I can't shake off the idea that I'm not fully connected with you if I'm talking to you and I'm wearing something in my ears...
    • jorisw 4mo ago
      Yeah, to me personally it just seems like treating the other person (e.g. a cashier or waiter) like a tool or utility rather than a human being. Even if your music is paused (which they can't know)
      • danielbln 4mo ago
        Have you asked an actual cashier what they think? They handle hundreds of people every day, do you really think they consider it rude if people don't chat them up? You can smile and say hello and thank you with or without headphones. This once again seems like a cultural divide, as a German I'm happy if noone talks to me outside of smiles and hello/goodbye, this might be different in the anglosphere.
        • jorisw 4mo ago
• h0nd 4mo ago
  Most headphones these days are also a headset, allowing for bi-directional communication. Does it make a difference?
• steve1977 4mo ago
  What I find interesting is that the article seems to imply that wearing earbuds to isolate is somewhat "unnatural" (for lack of a better term). However it does not take into account that the kind of social interactions where people wear earbuds (i.e. loud and busy environments with many strangers, often physically closer than comfortable) is unnatural to begin with. For me, isolating myself acoustically is a way to normalize such environments back to a more "natural" setting.
  • nicbou 4mo ago
    Yes! When walking along busy streets, I put my airpods on without music just to remove some of the car noise.
    • embedding-shape 4mo ago
      I do the same when visiting large metropolitan areas! I don't want to be completely deaf, but reducing all the high-pitched noises and rumbling really makes my perception see/hear the environment more calmly.
    • OkGoDoIt 4mo ago
      Whenever I try to do that, the noise canceling amplifies the wind noise so much it winds up being louder and less comfortable than not wearing them at all.
  • gijsnijholt1980 4mo ago
    Agreed. Unrelated pro-tip: wearing them while riding a motorcycle. Reduces fatigue and transforms a rough experience into almost luxurious. Highly recommended.
    • ginko 4mo ago
      Being able to hear your surroundings on a motorcycle or bicycle seems very important for safety to me. Filtering that out feels dangerous.
• bschwindHN 4mo ago
  Tangentially related, but it's interesting to use airpods in hyper-busy train stations in Japan like Shinjuku station, where you have a huge mass of people, and a large majority of people using bluetooth earbuds of some sort. A train rolls up and the sheer amount of 2.4GHz traffic can jam your own audio for a bit. It's an interesting stress test of radio interference.
• gspr 4mo ago
  > They keep them in while ordering and paying for things in stores and supermarkets. This hit me. I often use headphones during chores, including going grocery shopping. I love human interaction, but not while pickings things into my shopping basket. For years I'd also leave them in when paying (audio paused, of course). It took a cashier tell me I was being rude before I realized. She was absolutely right, of course. I do make an effort to visibly remove my headphones when expecting human interaction now. A big thanks to that cashier, and my apologies!
• robert-boehnke 4mo ago
  > Where I live, in southwest Germany, AirPods are far less common. Seems like there’s a high probability the author just drives everywhere at home.
• tacker2000 4mo ago
  The author is a "Firm believer that humankind took a wrong turn with the invention of the smartphone." and has a new book coming out, so naturally he is trying to push some anti-tech narrative. No, headphones don't make people antisocial. If someone is wearing headphones, respect their privacy and just leave them alone. Some people just don't like to chat to random people on the subway or at the supermarket. Some people just don't see the value of mundane conversations with strangers. It depends on the culture and personality. Some people like it, some don't. In the US, people are more inclined to chat to strangers, and in Germany for example they aren't. These differences are actually what make us "human", so it's not a binary decision of: talking to strangers == good, and headphones == bad.
  • jorisw 4mo ago
    I don't think the author presents it as such a binary decision though. The fact is that in practice, it's either headphones in or out when in public. Meaning wearing them all the time effectively means IRL Do Not Disturb. > I think we need regular doses of real human contact — not just with close friends, but with acquaintances, and even with strangers — to counterbalance all the negativity we encounter in the news and online, and to remind us that, on the whole, people are kind and well-meaning. I think the author may have a point here, but he'll be hard pressed to convince anyone to give up the benefits of 'sonic isolation' through music and noise cancelation that people seem to have discovered.
    • wiseowise 4mo ago
      > I think we need regular doses of real human contact — not just with close friends, but with acquaintances, and even with strangers — to counterbalance all the negativity we encounter in the news and online, and to remind us that, on the whole, people are kind and well-meaning. Well how about cut all the negative bs so there’s nothing to counter-balance? Nobody forces you to read news if they affect you so much.
  • lnenad 4mo ago
    On a gut level I agree 100% as I'm feeling the same feelings and prefer no contact. But on a biological level it's definitely better to have more social interactions and talking to strangers specifically has many benefits to both you as an individual and for creating a better society.
• ro_bit 4mo ago
  The author's going to be floored when he hears about video games
• wolvoleo 4mo ago
  Meh. When I was young the old people complained that everyone was wearing walkmans (with those metal band orange foam headphones lol). It's just old man shouting at cloud. And no, I don't want to talk to everyone. Piss off and leave me alone. I also hate noise and I really love wearing my earbuds (I don't use Apple) with no audio but just the noise cancelling on when I'm on public transport or walking. Sometimes with nature sounds like rain if the coverage is not strong enough. I never listen to podcasts by the way, I truly hate them. Same with youtube videos, I just don't have patience to consume content at someone else's pace.
• Sweepi 4mo ago
  I think "Your Brain Needs Idle Time" is more important than the effect on random social interactions.
  • roryirvine 4mo ago
    That definitely applies to me, but I'm not sure everyone is the same. Some people have the TV on every waking minute of the day, no matter what else they're doing. Some listen to music or podcasts in the same way. Others scroll through social media whilst eating or walking or even during conversations with other people. It's not a new thing, either - constant background TV was definitely a thing at my grandparents' house when I was a child in the 1980s. Personally, I find the idea horrifying but I accept that I'm a bit of an outlier!
• collinmcnulty 4mo ago
  What I would really love is an option to have a small indicator light or visible signal on my earpiece that means “there’s no sound playing”. And if I’m using them just for noise cancellation but want to appear approachable, I can turn it on. Honestly would be great for sound my home, as sometimes I keep them in when doing chores just because I don’t have a free hand, but I would like my wife to know she can talk to and I’ll hear her.
  • lukan 4mo ago
    Outside I sometimes have headphones on without music, just so people do not approach me .. But with your wife, doesn't eye contact work as communicating need for talk? Body language?
    • collinmcnulty 4mo ago
      Sometimes I’m washing dishes and she walks into the room and doesn’t immediately know if there’s sound in my ears. It’d just be a nice little affordance to be able to proactively signal that.
• bejd 4mo ago
  After reading about the default mode network here a few times recently, I think missing out on all that critical "daydreaming" time is a bigger problem. I've stopped listening to things while I'm out walking, and I've noticed a lot more solutions and ideas coming to me. The DMN seems to fall into a similar area as meditation (remember when that was all the rage among tech leaders?); the lowered input noise gives the brain time to clear things out.
  • coffeebeqn 4mo ago
    Just any time in your day where you’re not bombarded with external input is getting very rare
    • not_a_bot_4sho 4mo ago
      Far too much of this bombardment is self inflicted and very much related to smartphone use.
  • _trampeltier 4mo ago
    I miss daydreaming too. In younger years, I often had boring, repetitive work but I could daydream the full day. Then as more you need the brain for work, as less time you have to daydream. Now I have really cool work, but I can't daydream at all. Even I use mostly public transportation (train) and have my headphones with me, I rarely use they. I kind like to hear and feel the people around me.
    • auto 4mo ago
      In high school and college I worked at a Christmas tree farm, and eventually was also a landscaper/hardscaper, caring for, digging up and planting trees, and building retaining walls and patios. At the time it made for good motivation to keep doing well in school, as the hours were long, and while easy for a fit 18-22 year old, definitely back breaking kind of stuff. However, looking back on it I miss those weeks and months on end of having 6+ hours a day to be outside, working my body, but doing tasks that let my mind wander all over. No doubt those years of daydreaming helped me become the person I am today, and everybody has to grow up at some point, but I do wish I could get more of that back into my daily life. In fact, I think a large part of my current path towards early retirement is just to have that sort of time back.
• imaginationra 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  • Hnaomyiph 4mo ago
    While crass, I’m likely going to think about your comment for a long time as someone who typically doesn’t enjoy surface-level interactions or doesn’t enjoy engaging with people who I know the relationship will never move from acquaintance/coworker levels. Your comment will likely make me leave my AirPods in their charging case more as I go about my day to day activities, or at least think about using them more intentionally than I do now, which is having them in basically 24/7.
  • Esophagus4 4mo ago
    > Put your phone away, don't wear your airpods and live in real life- or continue with your airpods and your neck cranked down into your phone- you don't need friends anymore, AI will be your friend. I have had decent conversations with strangers on planes and trains while my headphones were in. I paused the music to talk for a bit. It doesn’t have to be either-or. Headphones don’t make you antisocial - being antisocial makes you antisocial. “Life finds a way”
• jzb 4mo ago
  This is not new. AirPods are newish, but this is not new. People have been wearing headphones in public spaces since the Walkman, if not before, in large numbers. You can probably find opinion columns bemoaning this shortly after the introduction of the Walkman.
  • malicka 4mo ago
    The seeming ubiquity is definitely new.
• hnthrow10282910 4mo ago
  I live in a big city and notice this a lot as well. I’m starting to reduce my headphone usage. My hearing is getting worse at a young age. I don’t think the default should be needing to have a soundtrack to your life. I’m a long distance runner and often run 15-20+ miles without music or headphones. It’s nice
  • codeduck 4mo ago
    I often use over-ear headphones as ear-protectors rather than sound sources. It muffles the outside world, leaving me free to think. I suspect in-ears have degraded my hearing, so I don't use them any more.
    • hnthrow10282910 4mo ago
      I just got some ear plugs that swimmers wear, quite nice
  • chistev 4mo ago
    > I’m a long distance runner and often run 15-20+ miles without music or headphones. It’s nice https://youtube.com/shorts/aqWDyakwRg8?si=LZddNysBymNXLgZI https://youtube.com/shorts/aqWDyakwRg8?si=LZddNysBymNXLgZI
    • wiseowise 4mo ago
      Jesus H. Christ, what a terrible day to have ears and eyes. Who even consumes this “content”?
      • chistev 4mo ago
        People who you think you're better than.
      • KolmogorovComp 4mo ago
        Thank you, don’t worry you are not alone.
• Tade0 4mo ago
  > People now wear their AirPods all day at the office. Hey, that's me! Not with AirPods specifically, but I do have noise cancelling headphones. We can talk over lunch or during a break. > They keep them in while ordering and paying for things in stores and supermarkets. Now that is just rude.
• lonelyasacloud 4mo ago
  Like huge SUV and pickup trucks in urban environments, guns and the like; their usage - and the perceived need for them - is a strong code smell of inhumane environments.
• havaianaslife 4mo ago
  we all have a choice to use or not and the depending of the context we live in there could be more or less benefits overall (metro city vs bucolic small European village). But what this article capture for me is something more philosophic, anthropologically as Aristotle told us we are social animal, and for about at least the past 5k years we benefited a lot as a group by contamination, etc.. now we live in more bubbles, bubbles are more diffused than previously and we must at least acknowledge what we are missing in the process. It's the same difference between old generalist medias, tv shows, books culture, and the more different possibilities and bubbles we live (more importantly grow, sometimes without touching the "local" "proverbial" grass). It's interesting to observe a social phenomenon that is mostly recent: + walkman 80s but diffused as today the Bluetooth headset only years later but not comparable + mp3 player 2000s not comparable as capabilities and more of a young adopt early technology + smartphones 2010s mass adoption but at least you hear mostly people around you. + air pods 10y ago on September -> in 10 years are adopted more than any of the previous tech. Adoption rate is hug (i consider also other brands) and to be honest there is another topic correlated -> most young people have lived the covid pandemic and interiorizited some behavior also grown up in some white collar sector live with headset after the pandemic, cause of smartwarking but also the more diffused use of team/zoom/meet in the workplace now there is also ai (and it's a matter of time we will want a constant access to it that can also be headset related) and smart glasses are near than ever. there could be consequences in less than 10y. It's a social science matter nobody taking seriously.
• ForHackernews 4mo ago
  "And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time."
• NoGravitas 4mo ago
  Everything old is new again; observe this song from 1983: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR_b3WYHZ7o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR_b3WYHZ7o
  • lelandfe 4mo ago
    And the mid point, Bowling Alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
  • dredmorbius 4mo ago
    "Walkman On" by SSQ.
• jimlawruk 4mo ago
  > The number of spoken words uttered by the average person fell by 28% between 2005 and 2019 This effect started well before Airods and even smart phones became ubiquitous. The airpods were released in Dec of 2016. Before Blackberries and Iphones, people on the subway all had daily newspapers in their face. In DC we had a free abridged version called the Express.
• mitchitized 4mo ago
  The author has clearly never tried to leg press 300+ pounds in the gym to Madonna's "Like a Virgin". Sometimes the biggest sell of earbuds is noise REDUCTION, not what sounds they can make. I do agree that there are "social interactions" that are greatly devalued by people wishing not to be interacted with. But for me the earbuds are usually in to block annoyances, not avoid human contact.
  • finnthehuman 4mo ago
    Agreed. I wear headphones because open offices suck and I like music. I’m not trying to avoid anyone.
  • javier123454321 4mo ago
    This is talking about the second order effects of using the earbuds to avoid annoyances. It might not be the conscious reason you do things, but it is an effect that it has. The question worth exploring is what is the second order effect when people grow up where being isolated acoustically, or doing the social signal of having earbuds in even without something playing, is the norm for all interactions?
• alun 4mo ago
  Anecdotally, when it comes to talking to strangers I've often felt it's easier to converse with older people than those my own age. For example, the conversations feel more genuine and less "forced" on both sides, and overall I feel more comfortable being myself. The reason might be because they grew up in a world where social media was non-existent, so interacting with strangers was more common. As a result, they tend to be more socially intelligent than the younger generations. Will be thinking about this article the next time I reach for my AirPods as I'm about to leave the house.
  • cassepipe 4mo ago
    To me it's easier to talk to older people because it is a given that being old past a given threshold generally lowers your social status in modern societies and they tend to be more lonely on average. We have all met someone who is old and is desperate to establish contact about anything. This means that their whole demeanor is inviting conversation, establishing eye contact and smiling and all that I happily "take the bait" cause I am a quite patient person but sadly, people who are lonely have such an urge to talking that they are totally incapable of listening. I consider myself a good listener, competent at signaling than what they are talking about is actually going through but a lot of the time they might as well be talking to a tree.
• ExoticPearTree 4mo ago
  It is an amazing piece of technology that allows you to ignore people at will by pretending you're not hearing what they're saying if they insist. AirPods for sure do not make you more lonely. It's about your personality. Either you are an introvert or not. > “No one talks on the bus. No one greets the barista. Even in class, students are choosing to listen to music instead of their professors,” Why? Bother them for no good reason? I am incredibly annoyed when people come to me to make small talk. Same with classes... if the topic is interesting or the professor is good at its job people will listen. If the professor has a very non-interesting class or is a boring person, why bother listing to it? You read the notes, get a the lowest passing grade possible and go on with your life. Before tablets people would read their newspapers and be very annoyed if you bothered them. Now they have AirPods instead of tablets or newspapers. Same thing: no everybody wants to talk to everybody.
  • euio757 4mo ago
    >> “No one talks on the bus. No one greets the barista ... > Why? Bother them for no good reason? Those 2 examples for the article are not the same situation at all... in many cultures: "No one talks on the bus" --> very good, people are here to commute and want quiet. "No one greets the barista" --> Wow, you're a POS human being. It's basic human dignity to greet the people you interact with. Try the latter in a country like France for instance, skipping the "Bonjour", which is the expected cultural greeting (You're not expected to do small talk, just "Bonjour"), keep your airpods on and just place your order ... and see how the person on the other side reacts :)
    • angrydev 4mo ago
      Baristas in NYC don't care about being greeted specifically. They want to take your order so they can move the line along. You will get a very strange look if you try to small talk in a busy cafe.
    • ExoticPearTree 4mo ago
      > It's basic human dignity to greet the people you interact with. No. While it might be nice, it is not mandatory. And no, no one is a POS just because it doesn’t say hi first. You have to be very entitled to think it is required or that you deserve it.
• TaupeRanger 4mo ago
  TLDR: "I think AirPods increase social isolation, I don't have much good evidence for it, and although I started the article by observing how many MORE Americans use AirPods, I completely contradicted myself at the end by pointing out how Germans, who apparently use AirPods less, are still less friendly/warm to strangers than Americans." Suspiciously close to an AI slop article.
• ajsnigrutin 4mo ago
  > This habit of using headphones to dodge uncomfortable interactions may be especially common among younger adults, for whom social unease and feelings of isolation are well-documented problems that have become more common in recent decades. Earphones (not specifically apple ones) are great for this. My city has become a touristy hotspot in the recent years, and you can't walk 50 meters through the city center without some homeless guy, or a romanian woman with a baby asking you for money, some "finnish" guys trying to sell your their music cd (that you have nowhere to insert anymore), some scammer offering you a flower or someone trying to sell you a boat tour of a city you've lived in your whole life. Earphones in and you don't even have to reply, just ignore everyone.
• conductr 4mo ago
  I was in college when the first iPod came out. As an early adopter that was super into my music that first year or so, wearing white headphones around campus actually came with more social interaction. It felt like everyone was staring at me and usually people constantly interrupted my jam sessions to ask me about them. The novelty quickly wore off for me, I realized I preferred a more private speakered environment for my jams. I also did and still suffer from massive pain caused from most in ear headphones, even the recent AirPods with adjustable silicone tips I use sparingly and never more than a hour or so. What was weird was about 2 years later it completely flipped. I had written off my iPod in public while the entire world adopted them. I went from being the only one on a bus with white corded buds, usually recipient of people’s gazes, I was being antisocial and everyone’s eyes were telling about it. To suddenly, I was the only one engaged. Everyone else was being antisocial. This was well before the iPhone but people still just stared at their play list and stopped interacting. A quiet bus full of college students was a strange thing to witness but it took over as the social norm.
  • Dracophoenix 4mo ago
    > I also did and still suffer from massive pain caused from most in ear headphones, even the recent AirPods with adjustable silicone tips I use sparingly and never more than a hour or so. Have you tried replacing them with foam tips?
    • conductr 4mo ago
      Yes, I feel like I’ve tried everything and usually just use over the ear when I need them. More than anything, I just optimize for not needing them. I have a dedicated office so I can use speakers. I use the AirPods on flights under 3 hours which is my majority. I just have sore ears after and live with it. But I don’t wear headphones anywhere around town like what the article is talking about it. I see it and decided not to participate way back because of the antisocial part that was obvious so long ago.
  • kjkjadksj 4mo ago
    I don’t have airpods but I still use earpods for video conferencing. Honestly they fit and sound better (louder) when I have right and left switched.
• cassepipe 4mo ago
  To be fair when you live in a big city and you have to take the subway all the time, it just feels physically nice to remove the background noise whether it's the noise of the train itself or the musicians or the people asking loudly for money. I don't even have airpods, I have good old earplugs because I often too lazy to choose the soundtrack of my own life. It's not that don't want to talk to unknown people, it's that it's more important for me to avoid the unpleasantness of it all. It's all relative of course, I'd take a fast, crowded train any day rather than having to do the good old accelerate-and-stop of a traffic jam/city intersections. I live in a country with somewhat solid social net so I'd actually be in favor or preventing people to ask for money (loudly and in a pathos-optimized voice) in the train. It's generally people who are 1. having other income 2. drug addicts 3. mental issues or a combination of all that. I don't blame them but I wish there was a cruelty-free way of preventing them to do that because I don't think the amount of money they make is worth the amount of inconvenience they cause. Of course they are other ways of making the service better (more trains, closer to each other) but I believe the subway company is already hard at work on that. My point I guess is that it doesn't take much for something to become an unpleasant experience (as anyone who's ever had a significant dose of LSD will tell you) and that's it's easy to blame people (individualistic, selfish blablabla) but system-thinking is how you solve that kind of issue (and it's not easy)
  • goodmythical 4mo ago
    That's kind of the point the article is making though, isn't it? You're making a choice to insulate yourself from your surroundings. That choice has effects on both you and your environment. You see it as a simple salve, but the poor souls you're choosing to ignore see it as a just another bourgeoisie wall. I used to live in a prison. Headphones were a huge fighting issue. People who couldn't afford them would borrow, rent, or steal them. I never saw the point. Humans are a part of nature. I can sleep, eat, shower, and meditate just as well in the middle of a deadly riot (I was once asked by an officer to leave the dining area as they'd maced several people and everyone else had fled while I sat there calmly eating my institutional cheesy cardboard because I was more hungry than bothered by the mace) as I can in a forest or a dead silent bed room. Embracing or shunning the society you live in is a choice. Choosing either has consequences. My choice means that I am often driven to action to contribute to systemic solutions to the pain I see in life. It isn't easy, but I don't think I could live with sticking my fingers in my ears and pretending it isn't happening.
• jerf 4mo ago
  Who are these people who keep complaining about this supposed isolation and such? It's a complaint that periodically makes it on to Hacker News, but the more I think about it the more I feel like we're listening to a complaint made by a vanishing fraction of the population and giving them a more credence then they deserve because a few of them write with great pathos and drama. But I'm old enough to have ridden the bus not just before AirPods but before really practical and widespread headphones in general. (Headphones have been available for a long time, but people did not routinely carry them around because they did not generally fit conveniently in a normal-sized pocket.) I've spent probably hundreds of hours on busses, much of that on a college campus where we were probably about as similar a social situation as we can be. And busses were never rolling conversation hubs. They weren't tomb-silent but the conversations were almost always between parties who clearly knew each other. They weren't some sort of daily forum for the debate of politics, nor a reliable source of small talk. The only one that I will agree is something I used to do was small talk with the checkout clerk, because the transaction takes long enough to be socially awkward to be standing in silence, but again, inconsequential small talk. Every time I read one of these articles moaning about how we're all behind headphones and how impersonal the shopping experience has become, I become more convinced we're not listening to Important Social Commentary by Thoughtful Individuals... I think we're reading articles from that tiny minority of super-socially-aggressive people who used to incessently bother those around them with their overly intrusive attempts to converse with us in that distant past pissing and moaning about the fact that we now have the social ability to block them in a way that doesn't exceed our politeness threshold. The people that we've all met that we wish would just shut up, where we're sending them social signals and body language to please stop, and they just continue on. Now this is what they write in response to that. Now, I'll cop to being reasonably on the end of the "let me get in and out and accomplish my goal without your contribution", but I've spent plenty of time in contexts where I got to see other people in those contexts, especially as a child, and I just don't recognize the wonderland of social interaction these people seem to be missing out on. There was never a time where these random encounters (ignoring cases where you run into people you already know) were ever anything more than the briefest, most transient touch of humanity, and if someone is in a situation where they are starved for that, perhaps their problems are deeper and lie elsewhere and the solutions are something other than trying to convince everyone else to change for them.
• genghisjahn 4mo ago
  Same article was written about the proliferation of the Sony Walkman back in the 80s. Same article was written about newspapers on trains. File under “new thing is bad.”
• nativeit 4mo ago
  In America, I am _much_ less likely to encounter a friendly exchange with a a stranger than I am to be accosted for spare change by people for whom our obscenely wealthy systems have failed and/or decided are not worthy of assistance, so even small cities around rural areas have huge populations of unhoused people with a variety of deep-seated and untreated conditions. Also, although I live in a medium-sized metro area with >8M people, it’s in the South, and I have zero access to public transportation. I prefer to use AirPods for music/podcasts/radio in my car, where I’m alone either way, so that I can more easily answer hands-free calls (which is necessary for my job). Our society’s problem isn’t with AirPods, they’re just a symptom of the broader social decay that 80-years of inequality and deregulation has brought us.
• sailfast 4mo ago
  Sorry but this “people aren’t the same because headphones” (or podcasts or <insert here>) is just too convenient a narrative especially when your pull quotes are from random college newspapers and small scale studies. Having some music or a podcast to listen to on your commute is the new “I have a giant newspaper in front of my face”. If you want to have a random conversation you totally can! But like all things in life - the other person may not want to have that conversation at that time.
• wafflemaker 4mo ago
  First generation of AirPods Pro were the only in-canal earphones that didn't fall out of my ears (rare shape of ear canal and yes, I tried different sizes, they all fall out or don't fit). Only have over-ears headphones, so I keep borrowing pods from my wife when I'm cleaning/exercising. Was very disappointed when she lost them and the replacement - pro v3 - had fixed the rare shape and they started falling out like any other earbuds.
• bawolff 4mo ago
  > Heavy headphone use makes people feel lonelier, the survey found. It also makes people less likely to have a meaningful conversation with someone new. Many of those interviewed for the survey said they wore headphones in part to avoid having to talk to other people. Well that sounds like correlation might not equal causation if i ever heard it.
• trevwebdev 4mo ago
  When I'm doing a task, whether it's going to the grocery store or heading to work, the last thing I want to do is talk to someone. And in my personal experience, people don't randomly try to speak to me with or without headphones, unless it's someone wanting to pass out a pamphlet or a story employee asking if I need something. If I can make my social outtings in this regard easier and less stressfree, that far outweidghs any anti-social stigma.
• mcculley 4mo ago
  The modern world is funny. I have a hearing impairment, tinnitus, and use both AirPods and less visible hearing aids to hear people better. I only wear the AirPods around people who know me well enough to know that I am wearing them so that I can better hear them. I don’t want strangers to think I don’t want to hear them or that I am being rude. When I am out among strangers, I wear the less visible hearing aids. But a funny consequence is that because my modern, less visible, hearing aids are connected to my phone, I am often listening to podcasts or news and nobody can tell. So sometimes a stranger will say something and I have to pause the audio and ask them to repeat themselves. I am wondering what social norms will be like once everyone has less visible electronics in their ears.
  • russdill 4mo ago
    Wouldn't it be cool if this situation could be detected and when you hit pause it would actually repeat them for you?
    • SenHeng 4mo ago
      So you want your magical EarPods to be always listening and recording everything from the past, say 5 seconds?
      • russdill 4mo ago
        It would probably be the phone, but yes
      • rogerrogerr 4mo ago
        Already is, in some sense, for 'hey siri'.
      • dredmorbius 4mo ago
        A brief ring buffer is a fairly privacy-respecting implementation, as opposed to long-term capture and storage. Demonstrating that such a capability is in fact a brief ring buffer to the average Joe or Josephina on the street might prove more challenging, and numerous similar technologies have rapidly acquired a highly pejorative taint, e.g., "glassholes".
• kriro 4mo ago
  I wear over-ear headphones almost all the time when I'm out on my own using public transportation, grocery shopping etc. I listen to audio books (fiction) and it's great. I'm an introvert and this actually helps me keep high energy levels all day long. Another plus is I'm usually immersed in the story and not using my phone (well apart from it being a playback device) when sitting down or waiting somewhere. And it's precisely this extra energy I can use to have more meaningful interactions with other human beings. I don't wear headphones when I go climbing for example and interact with random strangers quite a bit when I do. I also don't appreciate the stereotypes that are flung about in the article. I'm also German, plenty of interactions as described in his Jalapeno-Story all day every day.
• mrcwinn 4mo ago
  Yes there were all these people talking on the bus before wireless headphones.
• yokoprime 4mo ago
  i've been wearing headphones in public since the 90s (walkman > discman), i have no idea how the author thinks headphones is a new phenomenon. I'm not particularly interested in unsolicited advice or conversation, so that's a plus for me.
  • javier123454321 4mo ago
    New is relative. 90s is still new for a lot of things. At any rate, the pervasiveness of it is new, and having a generation of people that know being isolated acoustically as the default state is also new.
• rhipitr 4mo ago
  One thing I find concerning is the amount of people I see driving these days with AirPods. Don’t think they can hear emergency sirens or honks very well that way. I think it it’s even illegal in some locations. I assume they do this in older cars without a way to connect their phone or just like immersive sound.
  • antinomicus 4mo ago
    AirPods have a transparency mode and are also fda approved hearing aids now. For some folks it is actually safer to wear them than to not wear them.
• malshe 4mo ago
  The author is from Germany and still complaining about Americans interacting with each other less in public? I've been to Germany so many times and almost never seen anyone speaking to strangers on trains/buses/trams. Once I was on a train from Cologne to Frankfurt with a colleague and we were talking nonstop. After a while we realized it was just us talking and probably disturbing everyone else! People go to extreme lengths to avoid talking to strangers on public transport even in developing countries. Earphones are just so effective.
  • purpleflashing 4mo ago
    Oh god I love how quiet European trains are. I used to take trains a lot in my childhood and until my 20s in Ukraine. Sometimes trains were buzzing with voices during the day, especially if someone was drinking. Not all rides were like this, of course, but in general I remember a lot of noise. German trains are so soothing in comparison!
    • malshe 4mo ago
      I find it funny that on some of the ICE trains they have a quiet cabin. To me that’s basically the entire train!
  • rikima_ 4mo ago
    in the netherlands trains are usually too noisy to focus on anything unless it’s a silent car or 7am.
• purpleflashing 4mo ago
  I am autistic. I can’t even count the number of times I got into dangerous situations because of my crappy social skills when strangers chatted me up. I don’t know, maybe strangers are well-meaning and kind to neurotypical people, or maybe people with good social skills can understand the intentions of strangers fast and cut off suspicious interactions before they are harassed or conned while I realize what’s happening only when it’s already happening, or maybe shitty people can sense my chronic social confusion and target me specifically… but I personally quite enjoy modern headphones etiquette where I live and the norm being not having random interactions. It feels way safer than in pre-headphones era (I grew up in a relatively low tech environment in a small town). Plus, processing spoken language is physically exhausting even when I am having an enjoyable conversation with someone I love. Other people already commented on the overstimulation aspect. Not suggesting that the world should be remade to accommodate my needs, of course, just wanted to share my experience, I guess.
• krosaen 4mo ago
  Wearing on public transport: meh, the chances I chat with a total stranger is quite small. Wearing on walks around my neighborhood: yes, totally see how this nudges away from spontaneous chats with neighbors / acquaintances as we pass each other and wave, but don't stop perhaps due to the friction of removing airpods and sense we may be interrupting each other. Sometimes if I see a neighbor I know up ahead, I will preemptively remove my airpods to open the possibility of a chat. Most of the time just a hello, but sometimes a nice catch up. With the airpods, very unlikely to chat.
  • chris_money202 4mo ago
    Really I see it as the exact opposite. A walk around the neighborhood is highly unlikely to strike up random conversation with a stranger. Might run into a friend or someone friendly but they are likely going to approach with or without airpods
    • krosaen 4mo ago
      Interesting that your experience is so different. I didn't mean strangers in my neighborhood though, just acquaintances / neighbors who I talk to sometimes - and airpods nudge the decision towards smile / wave keep walking over stop and chat.
• rishbz 4mo ago
  Noise cancelling is a treasure. What I like about them is the ease of use.
• gib444 4mo ago
  Totally relatable. It's not just earphones. Put your phone and headphones away and then observe people. Every one except the 70 plus will be hooked on their phones. That 20 second wait between getting up to get off the train and waiting for the doors to open? Pull out your phone Every desire for entertainment, education, distraction is filled by the phone. You're obselete. You can spend hours in an extremely crowded city constantly bumping into people and feel the most alone you've ever felt in your life Hyperindividualism has won
• deleted 4mo ago
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• bicepjai 4mo ago
  [dead]
• habosa 4mo ago
  The most jarring thing to me is seeing how kids (high school and college age) use Airpods now. I will see a group of friends hanging out in public and none of them take their Airpods out! They are talking and socializing, but they feel no need to remove the Airpods from their ears when nothing is playing. They're frictionlessly moving between real life conversation and content on their phones. This includes situations where you really think you'd want to take the Airpods out, like playing pickup basketball. I don't know how to feel about this. I guess I'm happy that they're out of their house at all, but it does feel very sci-fi. In sci-fi books a common trope is for characters in the future to have neural implants that seamlessly and permanently connect them to some mega-internet. 24/7 Airpods is like the caveman version of that.
• kleiba2 4mo ago
  I stopped chit-chatting at the water cooler because I have a specific sense of humor that not everybody likes. And by "not likes", I mean the feminist women in my department get offended. Very easily. And because they're women, they hold special power wrt HR. So I just quietly spend my day now.
  • minitrollster 4mo ago
    Um I think this might be on you and not them.
    • kleiba2 4mo ago
      Or just on the combination.
  • krapp 4mo ago
    So you literally cannot hold a conversation at work without making offensive and misogynist jokes in front of female coworkers? Is this something you need to see a doctor about?
    • kleiba2 4mo ago
      Perhaps. Just like you might have to see one about reading into other people's statements and blowing them out of proportion.
  • wiseowise 4mo ago
    I think you should joke more, ideally in the presence of HR. They will sort it out.
• ianbutler 4mo ago
  As someone who lived in New York for over a decade and grew up in the general area, there is not a single person who would think its normal if you're trying to strike up a conversation on the subway or even really when walking down the street. The etiquette is to keep to yourself, airpods aren't creating that dynamic. The normal assumption if you don't know the person in most contexts them interacting with you in NYC is they're up to something and that's just normal US city dynamics with > 10 million people on a busy day. The dynamic changes when you're hanging out in front of your apartment for say a cigarette or something or at a bar or sitting in the park but even then its not wrong to signal you're not open to interaction in those situations its simply more normal to chat with neighbors or other people hanging out.
• globular-toast 4mo ago
  Noise is a big problem but this is a terrible solution. People clearly hate noise. Rich neighbourhoods are always quiet. It's basically the point. We need to go hard on noise. I think it's one of the biggest sources of unhappiness today. We can start with motor vehicles which are easily the biggest single source of noise. People shouldn't have to disable their ears to deal with this constant assault.
• mspgrunt 4mo ago
  By jove people and their airpods are isolating us! Why cant we just talk to eachother like in the good old days https://i.imgur.com/38q0wOe.png https://i.imgur.com/38q0wOe.png
  • koliber 4mo ago
    It’s a funny comparing commutes back then to commutes now. But it does not take a lot of imagination to see that back then people did not isolate themselves with newspapers while buying food at the grocery store, standing on the crosswalk or in a myriad of their situations where we have opportunity for micro interactions with other people. In other words, looking only at commutes is nit picking.
• oceanplexian 4mo ago
  Yeah, great article. But it should get to the point. The reason you need to physically remove yourself is because of the insane lunatics that blast trash music and do a dance while aggressively panhandling or screaming at you for trying to commute quitely on the train to work. A hallmark of daily life when I worked in SF and in NYC. A great way to fix the fake problem would be to aggressively enforce the existing laws, starting with tickets, and if that doesn't work, incarceration. Apparently it's not politically correct to do that though so I guess we are all second class citizens who need to live in a low trust society where people are increasingly isolated.
  • finales 4mo ago
    People can’t understand you can’t have both protecting the poor and not enforcing laws against the poor at the same time
    • vicnov 4mo ago
      You can be poor and obey the law. You can protect the poor and enforce the law. It is the weird identity politics is what gets in the way.
      • braiamp 4mo ago
        There's a easier solution by crime caused by poor people: they stop being poor. The fact that nobody tried is the thing that should be studied instead.
        • Empact 4mo ago
          There's abundant evidence against this belief: * Lottery winners do not commit less crime than those who do not win the lottery: https://www.nber.org/papers/w31962 * Studies of identical twins adopted and raised apart shows that crime is more correlated with genetics than environment: 45% nature vs 18-27% nurture https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25936380/ * "While individual study estimates vary, meta-analyses have suggested the level of heritability of antisocial behavior is approximately 40–60%. Shared environmental factors have been estimated to explain approximately 11–14% of the variance in antisocial/criminal behavior and non-shared environmental influences approximately 31–37%" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6640871/ * “Black men raised in the top 1 percent – by millionaires – were as likely to be incarcerated as white men raised in households earning about $36,000.” https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2018/03/19/race-class-debate/
• angiolillo 4mo ago
  Different public spaces have wildly different expectations with regard to social interaction. Most people know better than to strike up a conversation with a stranger who is watching a theater performance, reading in a library, or walking briskly to work. Whereas chatting with people at a club, sporting event, carnival, conference, convention, etc is socially acceptable. But many places are ambiguous like public transit, gyms, shops, airplanes, etc. Assessing whether someone in those contexts would welcome interaction with strangers requires social awareness. Unfortunately, some people overlook or deliberately ignore these cues, so folks who aren't interested in social interaction have taken to wearing headphones in those contexts to make it as obvious as possible. If you're the kind of person who is surprised by how many people are now wearing headphones, it may be because you were missing their more subtle cues before.
• KolmogorovComp 4mo ago
  I’m reasonably skilled talking to strangers (can last about 3-4 hours in planes/trains/buses if the other party is up to it, after that I usually dry out of conversation), and do that frequently. However after several years of heavy traveling and hundreds of people talked to, you realize how similar everyone is. It is always the same issues, wife/husband, the kids, the parents… And it all starts to become a bit superficial. Sure, you can talk, but to what avail? You realize how shallow the situation is because the common ingredient in all stories is that everyone only ever care about their closed ones, which you and them will never be. And you reassess the book option whose insight or knowledge may very well impact your life much more than yet another seconds to hours long chitchat. Signed: a disillusioned extrovert.
  • antinomicus 4mo ago
    That’s sad man - I also talk a lot to strangers and yeah most of the time you get average people, but then you meet that one in a million person and learn something truly fascinating or expand your sphere of knowledge or emotion or art or whatever. I’m always on the lookout for the next brilliant engineer, sensitive artist, or just a well read janitor.
    • rTX5CMRXIfFG 4mo ago
      Wouldn’t you consult a book or a video and practice a skill if you really wanted to expand your knowledge? And a “well-read janitor”, while certainly possible, is a trope more often seen in works of fiction. And what does “expanding your emotion or art” even mean?
      • dredmorbius 4mo ago
        Conversation tends to be a less-curated alternative. You're going to read something you've elected to read, and have expectations of, whether that's a topic of interest, favourite author, recommendation by an acquaintance, current best-seller or well-reviewed work, something hunted down through references or footnotes, etc. The people you encounter daily may well also represent selection biases, but they're probably going to be at the very least along a different axis, and you might be surprised at what comes up. I like to have a balance of intentional and serendipitous feeds in my life, whether technically-mediated or organic. Keeps things interested. Having the book or a podcast on tap as needed isn't a bad backup. But talking, even briefly, to strangers may prove provocative.
• jedberg 4mo ago
  Noise pollution has always been a problem, especially in public transit. We finally have a decent solution. I don't think it's much more complicated than that.
• antinomicus 4mo ago
  I have a family member who works substantially on some of the main design/components of the AirPods who might have a different take. He wears them all the time but, as this article fails to mention, with transparency mode on. Thanks in large part to my family member, we are able to hear the outside world through the AirPods just fine and our brains are able to process the audio coming in as real time and not disorienting. Thanks to this mode the AirPods have now been certified as hearing aids and many other friends and family members have said the same thing: that the AirPods are better hearing aids than actual prescription hearing aids (which usually cost absurd prices) I talk to those people with those AirPods in as if they have no AirPods in at all, and thanks to those AirPods they are able to hear me better. This is all a matter of perspective and comfort ability with adopting new paradigms and technologies. You need not see everything from the perspective of “technology bad”.
• cpuguy83 4mo ago
  I'm reminded of the old-timey picture of a bunch of people on a train staring at their newspapers. Nothing new here.
• balgaly 4mo ago
  Turn on music, Turn off world
• avsn 4mo ago
  While I can see the point author is making, it’s weird how it is pinpointed to “headphone use”. I’ve been listening to music on the go for almost 30 years, starting with cassette players, then CD players, then mp3/ipods. Taking a bus/metro and listening to some new album or old favorite was very formative experience as a teen music lover. I have a sense that the important moment with regards to the issues described in the article was mobile internet becoming widely available and development of easy/good wireless headphones (AirPods). Social media and algorithmic streaming is a big part of this too, not just “headphones”.
  • billbrown 4mo ago
    100% this. People used to read newspapers and books on mas transit and Walkmans have been with us since the early 80s. I think it comes down to people not _wanting_ to interact with anyone outside of their circle. I pull out my earbuds _constantly_ when I'm out in order to greet people, interact with retail staff, and hear things around me.
• cratermoon 4mo ago
  I wear headphones because of all the people around me not using headphones while they listen to podcasts, talk on the phone, watch yootoob, and so on.
• mistyvales 4mo ago
  I stopped listening to music on my walks and bike rides years ago. I sit at home listening to music all day while I work, so to me it's a nice respite to enjoy the world around me.
• gacgacgac 4mo ago
  This article definitely doesn't account for those of us who are neurodiverse. My airpods buy me precious energy I can spend in social circles that I would otherwise not have. Force me out of them on a train or bus, expect me to be asocial for an hour when I get home. Nothing is more unwelcome than casual conversation with strangers. It's very difficult to know what to say and how to act. I don't have a machine built for interacting with this person, so every conversation is simultaneous developing and operating a machine. No thank you! And I'm not lonely nor isolated. I've curated the relationships I want. They are high quality, free from social media, and very active. I don't need someone sticking a spanner in my mental machinery on the bus.
• Lio 4mo ago
  Back home in the UK I find I need to always have my airpods with me because of the number of shops, supermarkets and cafes that blast out irritating pop music. I’m… sensitive to music I don’t like and find the experience almost painful otherwise. Small pocket, noise cancelling headphones have been a real game changer for me.
• dredmorbius 4mo ago
  I'm old enough to remember an earlier, but not the first, generation of portable recording/playback devices, the Sony Walkman (1979). Note that there had already been about two decades of such devices dating to the first transistor radios (and headphones) of the 1950s. Arguably a crystal radio set (easily hand-carried or wearable, and functioning without batteries) might also meet that definition. I don't know about earlier options, but the Walkman did become truly ubiquitous, and a large fraction of my peers had or wore these fairly constantly, with discussions at the time of isolation, as well as, fairly presciently, potential hearing damage. Another factor is that the soft foam over-the-ear headphones tended to leak a tinny resonance into the immediate area, and "sound leakage" was commented on and tsked about. There were also concerns about the antisocial nature of the devices ... or the intimacy of sharing headphones (one speaker apiece for singe-head sets, or for couples, dual-headset options). SSQ's "Walkman On" dates from that period: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597698>. I also remember from the late 1990s the first time I encountered someone walking down the street, talking apparently to themselves, using an early corded single-ear headphone with a mic. Mobiles were becoming more common, but were usually held to the ear. This behaviour struck me as much like what one might see from rough sleepers, though this man was far better dressed than most. The experience is of course now ubiquitous. Those sentiments are well reflected here: "The Forgotten War on the Walkman" <https://newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/the-forgotten-war-on-the-walkman https://newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/the-forgotten-war...> (July, 2025) HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44449970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44449970>
• tonic_note 4mo ago
  I think an angle the author misses is the degree to which we've all become intolerant of boredom. Moments of stillness and boredom have all but been erased from our daily lives, the daily commute being a great example. Airpods give us an easy way to not have to grapple with the prospect of not being entertained during every waking second of our conscious experience. But boredom is _really_ important – that's the DMN activity you want. Boredom gives your mind the chance to reveal things to you that you need to know, and may be actively avoiding.
• kashnote 4mo ago
  I wish I could walk around NYC without airpods in. Someone mentioned the lunatics and others blasting music but the main issue honking. The honking in NYC is unbearable. Add to that the noise that the subways make and the constant construction and you're risking actual hearing damage if you don't wear some noise cancelling headphones.
• destory-everyth 4mo ago
  ‘please mind the platform gap please do not eat or drink on the railway premises wear a mask don't lean against the door hold onto the handrails on escalator give way to alighting passengers don't leave your belongings unattended take out your travel card and tap for quicker entry and exit don't board if lights are flashing Molestation and taking upskirt photos is a serious offense do not meddle with the rail equipment its not a matter of if but when, our response matters, SG SECURE! in the event of an emergency take cover call 999, and wait for the authorities take the lift if you have bulky items This train has stop here because the train ahead is still at the station, "Your attention please. Please do not leave your belongings unattended. If you see any suspicious looking person or article, please inform our staff or call nine, nine, nine." etc, etc. Now repeat the whole thing in English, MandarinMelayu then Tamil and blast that record on repeat. sila berhati-hati di ruang platform, ombothu, ombothu, ombothu welcome to Singapore
  • gib444 4mo ago
    Very similar experience in England with ridiculously excessive announcements on trains. It's the verbal equivalent of being constantly slapped in the face.
• nunez 4mo ago
  The author hit the nail on the head with this piece. I purchased bone conduction headphones this year to serve as sleep headphones that work with my custom molded earplugs for sleeping. The headphones work as intended for this purpose, but I was not ready for how greatly they would change the way I move throughout the world. These let me clearly hear music AND my surroundings. No longer do I need to decide whether I want to socialize with others or enjoy music that I love. The headphones let me do both! (While AirPods have outstanding noise transparency capabilities, speech can get muddied depending on the environment.) Over time, I became SLIGHTLY more willing to engage in small talk with strangers. This combined with taking public transit to my co-working space (not the norm here in Houston; our transit system is criminally underrated) has improved my life much much more than I ever could have expected. (In fact, taking the bus and train in opened my eyes to how isolating driving really is. Between driving and WFH, you can go months without interacting with another human if desired. That can't be healthy. AI will make this worse.)
• cetarylic2 4mo ago
  This struck a chord with me because when our 9mth old was born, I leant heavily on airpods during night feeds and still do wear them when it's just me and her hanging out; we interact constantly and chat away but I always have them in. I also wear them listening to podcasts doing chores in the evening while my wife is on the couch; whenever she says something I have to ask her to repeat herself and its just not nice. I also agree with the lack of idle thought; my brain is constantly tied into some content stream. I need to be more deliberate - maybe I'll only use them for work (I work from home so use the for meetings and to hear notifications when away from my desk) and when running.
• brachkow 4mo ago
  The biggest effect of AirPods was that people stopped asking you to pull out the earphones when they talk to you. At early college age I was dealing with stress that I for some reason had in a crowded city, and my main help was listening to rhythmic music all the time. What annoyed me a lot that people from a coffee shop workers to beggars were making me more stressed by insisting that I must get my headphones out before the conversation began. With release of wireless Apple EarPods this behavior completely disappeared in a following year.
• bookofjoe 4mo ago
  Reading the comments and debate about whether or not AirPods use is rude or not when others are around, it seems like the uproar over Meta glasses but in a minor key.
• npilk 4mo ago
  This will be even more interesting when AR glasses finally go mainstream in a few years, further increasing this effect.
• nosslin 4mo ago
  I hate articles that tries to blame one company like Apple for airpods. It is a global phenomenon enabled by tech i.e. earbuds, podcasts, streaming, internet calling etc.