The cost-of-living crisis has wormed its way into every corner of our existence, making even the most basic necessities—housing, heating, transport, food—feel like luxury items. But one overlooked casualty of this economic calamity is headphones. Yes, headphones. Once a cheap, reliable commodity, they’ve now joined the ranks of the overpriced and unnattainable.
Anyone who still uses public transport, will surely agree that in a world of 15second long TikTok videos, the overpriced nature of headphones is a problem when the average person feels finacially squeezed enough to forego a pair of bluetooth headphones, but still insists on drip feeding their dopamine dependant brain by playing each video aloud, to the ire of myself, and presumably other passengers.
Because in a world increasingly devoid of civic manners and decorum, without cheap and affordable headphones, we’re all being forced into an auditory free-for-all.
Long gone are the simpler times when we’d spend half the bus ride untangling a dodgy pair of €5 earphones, jamming them into a now almost technilogically defunct 3.5mm audio-jack, and enjoying our measly selection of poorly compressed MP3 files, limited as they were by internal memory storage capacities.
No wonder conversation, and the sight of someone reading a book was still reasonably evident on public transport even 10 years ago.
Back then, I don’t think we realized we were living the dream, where we had just one foot in the digital world, but kept the other one firmly planted in tbe real world.
But now? No headphone audio-jack means no cheap headphones. And combine no cheap and accessible headphones with no manners and a population increasingly addicted to social media in all its hellish forms, and i can assure you the result is simply no auditory peace for anyone brave enough to go without ear-protection.
And I’ve tried to go headphone-free, to live life with raw, unfiltered sound. But it’s not romantic. It’s hell. I’m subjected to everyone else’s questionable taste in music. Trap beats leaking from tinny Bluetooth speakers, teenagers loudly reciting and viewing TikTok trends, and—worst of all—phone calls on speaker. It’s chaos. And don’t get me started on people FaceTiming on public transport like we’re all desperate to meet their Auntie Maureen.
And believe me, I’ve snapped plenty of times. For its only when you are overhearing someone elses social media feed that you truly are faced with how utterly trivial (and irritating!) social media is in all its forms.
Sometimes, I counter the guilty parties’ rudeness with excessive, toe-curling politenness. Other times, I match the offenders’ rudeness and slight to my eardrums with my own rudeness and slight to their eardrums.
As they say, fight fire with fire.
Moreover, excessive headphone and phone usage has robbed us of some cultural gems. Think of all the overheard drama that one could entertain themselves with while on public transport a decade ago—the accidental soundtracks of lives playing out on the Luas Red Line or the 27a bus.
Sure, there even was a book series; Overheard in Dublin, with multiple spin-offs both in print and other formats.
But no book series like the aforementioned could ever be written today because everyone is either wrapped up in their own auditory world, whether privately with headphones, or publicly, by listening aloud and compelling everyone to else to hear alongside them, at the expense of real converstion and human interactions.
Here’s the kicker: I’ve accepted that one day, my headphone-less existence and low tolerance for this kind of behaviour is going to get me in trouble. I’ll snap at someone blasting London drill music at 7 a.m., and that’ll be it for me. But you know what? I’m taking that risk for you. So you can read your book, or stare out the window, or listen to the junkies quarrel over the best place to get their next ‘score’ in peace.
I leave you with this, Make Headphones Affordable Again, for the sake of my ears and yours.