The AirPods Effect

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'd much rather be surrounded by people wearing earbuds than have people watching tiktoks through their phone speakers on the subway

> 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.

Yes there were all these people talking on the bus before wireless headphones.

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

> 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.

Everything old is new again; observe this song from 1983: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR_b3WYHZ7o

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.

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.

I think "Your Brain Needs Idle Time" is more important than the effect on random social interactions.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.”

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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%20Ex...

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

Walking around cars or in cities, especially in New York, is incredibly loud. The ANC protect my ears on the subways and streets.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Do tattoos too. American living in Switzerland and it's shocking when I go back.

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.

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.

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.

The author's going to be floored when he hears about video games

> 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?

> 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!

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.

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.

Lack of shared values and things to bond over.

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.

Public, not pubic

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

> 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.

> 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.

looks like the seashells of Fahrenheit-451 were inevitable