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.

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)

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.

And I'm not an introvert!

All of this long predates Airpods.

I think this is a cultural difference, not a technological shift.

People go to extreme lengths to avoid talking to strangers on public transport even in developing countries. Earphones are just so effective.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

If I can make my social outtings in this regard easier and less stressfree, that far outweidghs any anti-social stigma.

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.

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.

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.

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://smackernews.com/item/48597698 HN>.

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...> (July, 2025)

HN discussion: <https://smackernews.com/item/44449970 HN>

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.

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%20Ex...

Also, Susan Cain's book Quiet claimed 1/3 to 1/2 of the population are introverted. (Who knows)

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And the lack of music is for the same reason: you need to be aware of the men trying to harass you.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

I felt like half the people around me in pubic had some kind of device-connected earwear on their head.

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!

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.

What I like about them is the ease of use.

+ 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Suspiciously close to an AI slop article.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.