Come On, Feel the Noise: How I Unplugged My Headphones and Reconnected With the World

Until about a month ago, the thought of leaving my flat without my headphones connected to my smartphone filled me with anxiety. Any length of time, whether a two-minute walk to the shop or a two-hour commute, with nothing but my own thoughts and the racket of the city to listen to, was enough to send me into a mild frenzy.

This borderline compulsive relationship with my headphones wasn’t something I was even aware of until earlier this year, when my friend, the environmental sound artist Lance Laoyan, noted how headphones not only disconnect us from the reality of noise pollution, but also keep us distracted under the guise of helping us to focus. This conversation sent me down a bit of a thought spiral, of which I am prone, and I became acutely aware of the ubiquity of headphones in our culture and how little attention we pay to it.

In Manchester, where I live, you’ll be hard pressed to spot anybody in the city centre not wearing a pair. Cyclists, commuters, runners, everyone. In 2022, according to research by Statista, 30 million of us used headphones, the majority in-ear Bluetooth headphones, such as Apple AirPods. By 2027, it’s predicted half of us will own headphones, the majority aged 25 and 45. Whether it’s music, a podcast or an audiobook, many of us choose to tune into anything but the outside world when we’re out and about but increasingly I’ve begun to question exactly why.

So, in April, I gave up my headphones for a month, in the pursuit of greater awareness of my surroundings and my relationship to my headphones – which is dependent, to say the least. They were intricately linked to my daily routine. Taking the bins out, exercising, washing dishes, writing, eating lunch, trying to sleep. The only time I lived without them was when their battery died. It was never – and I mean never – by choice. The anxiety that followed, until I was able to charge them, should have been enough to tell me that I was, at the very least, habitualised.