Headphones Off (sorry, Addison Rae!)

By Alana Lopez

Graphic by Ian Nugent

I got AirPods as a Christmas gift during my sophomore year of high school. Addison Rae was still fresh to the internet, and the thought that she would one day be a Grammy-nominated artist (for “Headphones On”, no less) couldn’t have been more unimaginable. I vividly remember coming back to school that January, and instinctually tugging the wires to pull my headphones off before walking into Algebra II. I’d done that exact action every day for so long that it felt strange to shed. 

I’ve been, for many years since, a loyal headphone wearer. There came a point when going without my headphones seemed like a personal affront to my way of living. I’m an Apple Music user (eye roll) and — I’m not even remotely inflating this number — my “Replay from 2020” told me I listened to 3,000 hours of music that year. The year of doing nothing, seeing no one and feeling perpetually directionless. I came to rely on music as a form of external connection when there was nowhere else to find it. 

Later in high school, someone told me I seemed “unapproachable.” I told my mom, and she asked me if I knew why. Obviously, I was aware that my music was too loud and if someone called out my name to say hi to me, I wouldn’t have heard them; but I told her no and that I didn’t really care. 

But in reality, I cared very much. The feeling of disconnect was always completely unbearable for me, but I never thought to question if the reason I had been so unapproachable, so standoffish, was because those around me detected I didn’t want to be talked to. Had I scared them all off? Could they hear “Miami” on repeat? Or worse — my three-day Greatest Showman stint? 

Every day, I walk down the street noticing headphones attached to heads, with no one able to hear one another. Just the other day, a guy in front of me on St. Mary’s bridge dropped his wallet and didn’t hear it hit the floor, or me calling after him. 

Music is important to culture because it's important to the individual. But the culture so many of us adhere to is centered around ourselves and especially our headphones. 

We use headphones for the obvious reason: we want to hear the album on repeat, we want to make the commute go by quicker. But we also use them as a crutch for awkwardness, to seem busy, or mysterious, or interesting. And at one point, my day was ruled by whether I had remembered to charge my headphones or not, so I switched back to the cords.

Now I try to keep them off for most of the day. With the same motion I used back when I was 14: I yank them out of my ears before I walk into class, and sometimes I don’t use them at all. 

The distance we keep between ourselves and the people around us while walking through our lives is latently unimportant. It seems so incredibly abstract that being able to hear someone say “Thank you” for holding the door open can make a moment feel less lonely. But refusing to take headphones off can make you forget you are an active participant in what’s going on in the world; you, too, could lose your wallet in the street and not even notice. When we discard hearing as one of our senses, we begin to lose contact with society around us. We accept the pain (as Addison Rae says in her song), but disconnection rarely ever makes us feel any better.