The AirPods Effect

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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!

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’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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.)

When Walkman came out:

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.

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

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)

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.

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.

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'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>.

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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44449970>

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.

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 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”.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.