I just can’t get you out of my head: how have headphones changed our lives?

Lily Isaacs

It will surprise no-one that headphones are extremely popular. One American study in The Atlantic found that as of 2012, almost half of younger office workers used them – an estimate which looks conservative a decade later, even before mentioning their use outside the office. A micro-study I conducted of around 30 UK university (predominantly Cambridge) students in December 2022, using the crude but effective Instagram poll, confirms what your eyes and ears have probably already told you. Almost all students use headphones daily; headphones are so ubiquitous that they ‘make their own rules of etiquette’, as one expert, Dr Michael Bull, commented. Not just popular and useful, they have become essential, and – depending on your view – an addiction. In my poll daily use averaged out at 4.5 hours. That’s around a quarter of waking hours and for some going up to 12 hours! Although others reported only 30 minutes a day, it was clear that headphones belong in daily life. The greatest consensus was on ‘how would you find life (especially a uni term) without headphones?’ Only one of 28 responses said ‘pretty much the same’. The rest were intense: ‘grim’, ‘horrific’, ‘strange’, ‘tragic’ and ‘mildly traumatising’. Three said, flat-out, ‘impossible’ and a further eight agreed, to the effect of ‘not something I could contemplate’. 

The answers on ‘why’ people used their headphones were mostly prosaic: studying, walking, gym, music (obviously). Podcasts, Netflix, and phone calls also appeared, as did being considerate ‘so I don’t drive my roommate insane’. There were some reflections, moreover, on precisely why we resort to headphones: ‘to do anything when I’m alone’ and ‘to be able to get through the day’, even as twelve respondents worried they used them too much. Headphones make life more manageable: for concentrating as a person with ADHD, for feeling safer in public spaces especially as someone of a marginalised gender, for dealing with sensory overload in busy environments. Other introspective comments explained how headphones changed their sensory environment in terms less specific to a particular identity. This included temperature – ‘keep my ears warm while walking outside’ – and a combination of touch and hearing – ‘the pressure/silencing on my ears [of on-ear, noise-cancelling headphones] is comforting’. These factors interact to create a generalised sense of reassurance, or in the words of the journalist Derek Thompson: a personalised ‘cocoon of sound in a shared space’. This was echoed in other comments that headphones feel ‘weirdly protective’, ‘hug my head’, and are, literally, a ‘comfort object’.  

Unlike most comfort objects though, which are usually something you can hold, headphones are inherently dynamic and absorbing. In pressing play, you ask to be immersed in something that moves and captivates your attention – a playlist, a podcast, ASMR – and thereby puts you off from pressing pause. This effect of ‘intensified immediacy’, in the words of the digital anthropologist Taina Riikonen, might be why they help ‘to distract from [one’s] internal monologue’ for those who ‘can’t be alone with [their] own thoughts’, a semi-joke repeated so often in the responses as to ring urgently true. This need to manage focus is, naturally, linked to work demands, and one respondent really struggled to work after losing their headphones. 

Yet there is no statistical evidence that headphones increase productivity; if anything, studies suggest silence is better than any alternative. I want to understand our attachment to headphones without relying on a linear sense of ‘productivity’, and with something more specific than what Derek Thompson (however charmingly) summarised as ‘good vibes’. I use the term ‘attachment’ intentionally. I’m not interested in condemning our relationship to headphones as an addiction or dependence - I’m thinking about our very real emotional and physical attachment. 

Listening to headphones is paradoxically both passive and active. I choose the music, the order, the volume, when to play and pause. But I have had no hand in producing the music or the headphones. Nothing is required of me while I listen. The moment you don a pair of headphones, you choose to submit to a potentially transformative experience –in the transitions between songs, and in hearing music that you haven’t heard before and that might generate an unforeseen mood. The ‘attentionally unavoidable’ effect of headphone audio has been put to sinister use in torture, as music researchers have discussed, but in a non-violent context, its ability to temporarily restrict our ‘cognitive freedom’ has obvious benefits for getting ‘in the zone’ to study.   

My second suggestion concerns what this ‘zone’ means for each of us. Many of the responses to my poll linked headphone use to ‘romanticising your life’: ‘feel like I’m in a film’, ‘soundtrack to my life’ and ‘main character mode’. If you are the ‘main character’, the film isn’t just any film, but one that affirms your individual identity by centring you in your ‘own world’. For some, the sense of identity derived from headphones is not only private, but actually hidden – for ‘watching something I don’t want others to hear’ – while for others it’s performative: ‘I LOOK COOL’. In the immersion of a city, a passive, anonymous experience not unlike wearing headphones, the anthropologist Riikonen argues that ‘there are no performance practices.’ Headphone use may seem too passive to be a ‘practice’, but wearing them can still be a ‘performance’, and one that changes depending on whether they’re Marshalls or AirPods, wireless, on-ear or in-ear. It can even be a playful disguise; I could be listening to anything under there! (A friend of mine swears by D&B in the library.) And so my inner world becomes special, because it feels secret and unique. 

I wonder if there’s also an imitative effect. When you enter a shared space with lots of headphone-wearers like, yes, the Seeley, perhaps there is solidarity in joining a silent collective of similar but different experiences, along parallel auditory tracks. Here, wearing headphones is at least as important as listening. You wave or smile to acquaintances, safe in the mutual recognition that in the library you (usually) won't speak. Increasingly, through the even subtler sign of wireless headphones, only noticeable to those who know to look, this privatised use of public space operates beyond designated quiet spaces as well, code for ‘don’t talk to me’ on public transport. By contrast, people of older generations often start conversations with me while I’m wearing headphones, not realising that I won’t hear. Wearing headphones then gains an added charge: it means defiantly asserting your age, your difference. At uni, meanwhile, it means you’re one of many. Your outfit might be carefully curated to display your individuality (or herd mentality) on Sidge, but your headphones keep all clues about your music taste to yourself (and your lucky Spotify followers). 

Perhaps, then, inhabiting headphones in daily life isn’t about increasing linear ‘productivity’ but about helping you ‘produce’ and develop more of yourself. I confess to happily relying on headphones for hours a day in term-time. They enrich my work and play, but I think my attachment to them has less to do with how much I listen, and more to do with knowing I have the option. In a vulnerable moment of ‘forgetting myself’, I can dip into a kind of river of memories: my old music recycled, combined with unfamiliar tunes, layered with both unexpected and oft-trodden associations. Hearing the right few bars at the right time anchors me in my evolving self, through the intimate, enveloping vessel of the headphone.  

And yes, I am wearing headphones as I write this. But I’ll leave you to guess what I’m listening to.