Er, excuse me. Hello? I’m sorry, but would you mind taking your … I SAID, WOULD YOU MIND TAKING THOSE EARPHONES OUT FOR A SECOND, PLEASE?
I try, in the main, to be a live-and-let-live kind of person. Patient. Considerate. But this patience is being tested to breaking point by the proliferation, the epidemic, of almost-ubiquitous earphones.
The world must be shut out, apparently. The wearer has nothing to learn or gain by listening to anybody else in their vicinity. They would rather be elsewhere, plunged into music or a novel or maybe a noisy pavement phone call, which will remain, sadly for the accidental eavesdropper, a slightly odd one-way exchange only.
The hill I will die on is that there is a fascinating and beautiful world out there, filled with conversation and laughter and the possibility of making new friends and acquaintances. But instead of taking part in all that, people prefer to plug in their earphones, tune in and drop out.*
This phenomenon seems to be 21st-century proof of Pascal’s belief that the “inability to sit quietly in a room alone” is the source of all our problems. There must be constant, piped-in noise. Silence is the enemy.
Perhaps this is another consequence of Covid lockdowns. We got used to being on our own, working at home, earphones in, to save flatmates or family members from the distraction of other conversations. Back in the workplace, the earphones have stayed in. Maybe this can help with concentration, a protest against the enforced intimacy of the open-plan office. But it makes life harder for colleagues who may want to ask a quick question, or for a benign boss – other types of boss are available – to show some interest in you, when they are “managing by walking around”.
Imagine if, two centuries earlier, Wordsworth had wandered lonely with his AirPods in. Would he have ever heard the “still, sad music of humanity, / Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power / To chasten and subdue”?
OK, maybe it is polite on the bus or the train to stick the earphones in and avoid creating noise pollution. People who are neurodivergent may want to block some things out. But personally, I usually enjoy listening to the conversations you can hear, in a range of languages, on public transport. I know that Nigel Farage objects to that sort of thing, but the rest of us don’t have to.
I say: take the earphones out, lend me (and everyone else) your ears and enjoy the world around you. Choose real life. At the very least, staying alert could save you from getting run over, or mugged.
And, you know, if there weren’t so many of these earphones permanently on display, then maybe people would stop launching so many podcasts.
* I make an exception for the new audio version of my latest book, you’re allowed to listen to that.
Stefan Stern is co-author of Myths of Management and the former director of the High Pay Centre. His latest book is Fair or Foul: The Lady Macbeth Guide to Ambition
