The hill I will die on: Remove those earphones – you’re blocking out the music of humanity
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.
Yeah, as a general rule, back in the days when I was going places on public transport and had a discman or mp3 player to distract me, I did in fact want to be elsewhere. I wanted to be either at home or at whatever my destination was. I didn’t want to be on the fucking bus with other people and their noise. Hence why I tried to have some of my own with me at all times.
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.
Yeah, I’ve HAD conversations on buses with people I didn’t know. I didn’t particularly WANT to know them either. Especially not that cunt who threatened me with violence when I snapped at him to shut up about how late the bus was (what, a bus service terminating at Pagewood being late? I’m shocked, shocked). I mean, I’m usually happy to take part in conversations, just not when they’re imposed on me in a place (i.e. bus or train) I dom’t want to be in. I feel like Stefan Stern doesn’t need to take p.t. regularly somehow, or he’d know just how constant other people’s noise is.
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’m actually pretty OK with conversations in languages I don’t speak because I DON’T understand them; it’s the ones in English I hate cos I DO understand them and they’re usually shit and I can’t NOT listen to it cos it’s too loud to ignore. I’ve spent decades hearing the music of humanity every time I need to catch a bus somewhere, and I’m delighted that I only have to do it once every couple of months these days…
