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Noise Cancelling Headphones and the Illusion of Personal Space
My wireless headphones broke several days ago. I only got sound out of one earbud at a time, a thing I had foolishly thought would no longer happen to me in the era supposedly without wired headphone fatigue. The good news was that I had them under warranty and the manufacturer was sending me a new pair. Hooray! But, what was I to do in the meantime? I have an iPhone as my primary device and it has the, frankly, stupid charging port instead of a standard headphone jack. My leftover wired noise cancelling headphones wouldn’t work without a dongle, one that had already previously broken (thus leading to the purchase of wireless noise cancelling headphones) and so I was left with one option — the non-noise cancelling headphones that came with the phone.
It was, to be glib, a bad time, you guys. I could hear everything. Mindful of the two family members who are near-deaf (“promise me you’ll take care of your ears,” my eighty five year old grandfather tells me again and again, in quiet earnestness) and the reports of millennials with a much higher rate of hearing problems, I keep my headphone volume at never more than fifty percent, or to the dead center of the play button. With regular headphones, this absolutely doesn’t do the trick. I’ve adapted to life with noise cancelling headphones, so much so that not having them entirely breaks my routine.
It seems to be a recurring issue. I buy noise cancelling headphones, they become part of my life, they inevitably break months down the line, then my stress level ratchets up in the ensuing time it takes to purchase new ones. Using regular headphones only makes me more annoyed, as what I want to hear battles with what I can. I can hear every passing car, every conversation behind me, every gust of wind. My morning Metro ride is deafening. I can’t focus in my open office plan work setting.
I, like many others in this digital age, have become accustomed to being able to carve out quiet for myself in the world around me with minimal effort. Once I lose it, I realize how vital that coping mechanism is to my every day life. But, why is that?
The Illusion of Privacy
There’s several different forms that this feeling I have while wearing my noise cancelling headphones…
