Honestly, I remember a time when silence was just silence. Back in the day, all you had to do was find the nearest quiet corner, grab a good book, sit down and the world would slowly fade away without any effort on your part. No buttons had to be pressed, no batteries were required, and no Bluetooth devices had to be connected.
But for some reason, humanity decided that wasn’t enough. They went ahead and engineered silence. It had to be packaged and sold back to them for a ridiculous price.
Now, noise-canceling headphones are marketed as the modern miracle, claiming to transport users to an oasis of tranquility. All that is required is half of your months worth of rent. Last winter was when I finally broke down and decided to purchase my own.
After enduring endless bus rides alongside weirdos who think having speaker phone conversations in public is somehow acceptable, it was bound to happen eventually. A teenager sitting next to me blasting what I can only describe as music composed by someone violently throwing pots and pans down a staircase became too much. The bass was so aggressive it practically performed cardiac massage on everyone within fifteen feet of him.
A sales representative named Tyler, whom I assume from his name tag, guided me around, so I walked into an electronics store where I was supposed to make a purchase. It looked like he was more than eager to provide assistance to me. He told me that he was an ‘audio solutions consultant.’
He appeared to be more over excited for headphones than the majority of people regarding their firstborn children.
“They smart boys right here,” he said while stroking a sleek pair of black headphones as if they were a cute newborn kitten. “Employ highly advanced quantum wave technology to analyze ambient noise and produce counter frequencies.”
“Quantum wave technology?” I inquired. I had some reasonable skepticism regarding this.
Absolutely, Tyler nodded vigorously, his product knowledge unencumbered by scientific accuracy. “They detect a sound waves, flip them upside down and boom. Silence.”
I’m no physicist, but after all that explaining nonsense I felt like a head could contain tiny wizards casting silence spells.
Regardless, when he allowed me to try his headphones on, store’s cacophony dimmed to a whisper. It was enough for me to become fully convinced, my credit card all of a sudden sprang out from my wallet. The first few days with my new technological marvels were nothing short of extraordinary.
I was able to sit on a bus and pretend that I was in space floating around, instead of being stuck in a metal tube with incredibly loud people. I was also able to work in cafes without hearing every detail of the barista’s recent breakup. I was able to live in public places without having to be tortured by strangers’ horrible music.
Without a doubt it was humanity’s greatest accomplishment after plumbing. And hence, the honeymoon period ended. It started with me being aware of my own breathing which the headset decided to amplify.
Each breath I took felt like darth vada after a workout and I could feel my heartbeat which was a previously blissful function, to now being the bass blaring my life. And then came chewing. Have any of you ever had the misfortune of listening to yourself eat?
Because it sure is a horrific experience. With the noise-canceling Helicopters each bite of apple sounded like a lumber mill. And a meager handful of chips was equivalent to the crumpling of garbage bags directly inside of my ear cans.
But all these troubling muscial betrayals were just the beginning. I was on my way to work on Tuesday when I heard a weird squeaky noise each time I took a step. My first instinct was to stop walking.
The noise ceased. Once I began to walk, it came back. I decided to devote five minutes toward figuring out where the noise was coming from.
It turned out that the noise was my winter coat’s inner lining that “dramatically collided” with the headphones I was wearing, creating a sound that would make it seem like a rave was taking place. While on the bus, the squeaky noise became even more annoying. The noise canceled out everything except the one thing I didn’t want to hear, which was everything else.
Extreme distance calls get tossed to me crystal clear and sniffling from six rows back blast directly into my head like I was on one of those old spaceship consoles. The whirling of the bus’s heating system sounded more like a jet engine that was ready for take off. The great irony of all of this revealed itself when I was commuting on a rainy Thursday.
Usually, when I am wearing headphones, I can’t hear the constant noise from the bus, neither can I hear other passengers talk to one another, but with the rain, instead of droplets falling, it sounded like I was trapped inside a microwave. The noise had the potential to leave anyone angry so I can’t imagine what it would do to my headphones. Equally miserable was working in the office.
The headphones, clearly programmed with a sense of humor, decided not to cancel out Karen from accounts laughter. Instead, her annoying cackling somehow pierced every sound around me whilst erasing superfluous voices such as my colleagues attempting to talk to me directly. This resulted in some embarrassing situations where I would take off the headphones only to discover that three people were at my desk staring at me waiting for a response from the question that I never heard.
“Sorry” I would say whilst taking off the headphones, “these things work a little too well.”
That’s a lie, but one bound to solve my social dilemmas. The real betrayal came in the claims the company made about battery life. “Up to 30 hours” is how the manufacturers described the life expectancy of the headphones.
I have learnt to interpret that quote as “exactly 17 minutes into your most important zoom call of the day.” My boss would be right in the middle of delegating important tasks to the rest of the staff whilst the headphones beeped, which is universal electronic speak for ‘surprise, I am dying, now’. Then they would immediately shut off. It wouldn’t globally be that challenging with regards to adjusting between serenity with noise canceling to wild brutal reality, akin to lifting off a dream to personnel being dragged into a heavy metal concert.
They present a rather extreme contrast. When considering “connection” as a problem, my headphones seem to be in an open relationship with my devices. They seem to have a mind of their own.
They constantly switch on and off depending on where I am. They connect to my phone when I am watching something on my laptop, then switch to my laptop when I want to take a call, and disconnect from both to flirt with my neighbor’s tablet through the wall. I have had more stable relationships with houseplants.
My lack of situational awareness is troubling. These headphones are instead the worst betrayal. With my having hardly any, I was relatively alert to my environment before them.
Now, lost in my world of sound dampening devices, I find myself being that person who does not register the fire alarm going off until the entire building has emptied out. Without knowing that the platform was changed, last month I boarded the wrong train and ended up in a suburban town I wasn’t even aware of. To save fifteen minutes of heading towards a crying baby’s direction was undone by a two-hour detour.
In spite of everything, I still use them. For every day, I put on my ear cuffs that serve to drown out the world and place me in a reality where I can hear my eyeballs moving, but not the person standing two feet from me. In the end, I’ve coped with the reality that filtration of sound comes at a cost and there’s no such thing as perfect silence.
Most recently, I tried to make sense of my misplaced headphones, claiming my relief stemmed out of comfort instead of my lost Apple products. After ten minutes of strenuously searching, I found them in the fridge: don’t ask, mornings are tough. The relief I felt searching the house was a lot more appealing and undoubtedly concerning, but my only goal in mind was treating it as a lost wedding ring.
That’s when it clicked that I had become dependant on these little sound suppressors: the problems of me becoming an abusive after setting technology boundaries. I keep giving them chances and put my trust in them betting the situation will be better, perfectly unlike what it usually is. I know for a fact that it won’t, but I will still strap on my headphones tomorrow and take a stroll.
I will go for my seventeen minutes of unbothered my thoughts quieting, a siren faintly wailing in the distance, and my ears reminding me of the battle of technology and humans. Now, I guess it’s time to add charging my headphones on my to-do list. They are beeping again.
