It's not that don't want to talk to unknown people, it's that it's more important for me to avoid the unpleasantness of it all. It's all relative of course, I'd take a fast, crowded train any day rather than having to do the good old accelerate-and-stop of a traffic jam/city intersections.
I live in a country with somewhat solid social net so I'd actually be in favor or preventing people to ask for money (loudly and in a pathos-optimized voice) in the train. It's generally people who are 1. having other income 2. drug addicts 3. mental issues or a combination of all that. I don't blame them but I wish there was a cruelty-free way of preventing them to do that because I don't think the amount of money they make is worth the amount of inconvenience they cause. Of course they are other ways of making the service better (more trains, closer to each other) but I believe the subway company is already hard at work on that.
My point I guess is that it doesn't take much for something to become an unpleasant experience (as anyone who's ever had a significant dose of LSD will tell you) and that's it's easy to blame people (individualistic, selfish blablabla) but system-thinking is how you solve that kind of issue (and it's not easy)
You're making a choice to insulate yourself from your surroundings. That choice has effects on both you and your environment. You see it as a simple salve, but the poor souls you're choosing to ignore see it as a just another bourgeoisie wall.
I used to live in a prison. Headphones were a huge fighting issue. People who couldn't afford them would borrow, rent, or steal them. I never saw the point. Humans are a part of nature. I can sleep, eat, shower, and meditate just as well in the middle of a deadly riot (I was once asked by an officer to leave the dining area as they'd maced several people and everyone else had fled while I sat there calmly eating my institutional cheesy cardboard because I was more hungry than bothered by the mace) as I can in a forest or a dead silent bed room.
Embracing or shunning the society you live in is a choice. Choosing either has consequences. My choice means that I am often driven to action to contribute to systemic solutions to the pain I see in life. It isn't easy, but I don't think I could live with sticking my fingers in my ears and pretending it isn't happening.
Adding to this, you never know in advance when your interlocutor's stop will come up. So subconsciously you know it's a bad idea to strike up a conversation. Plus it's a captive audience so the majority of people sense that it's wrong to "force" someone to talk.
And the trains are noisy. It's difficult and unnatural to talk above the ambient noise.
You should realize that there are people who can't do that.
To suggest that it is impossible for a given individual is different from suggesting that it is difficult which is different still from suggesting that it is suggested.
I have personally benefitted massively from deconstructing the walls that my parents and peers suggested I build as a child. It was work to do, and is work yet to be done, but I value it.
I am no longer angry in traffic when "the jackass can't see I'm late" or whatever other silliness. I no longer dread the stench and noise of public transportation. Both are natural. Just the way humans are. Being perturbed by it is a choice that I've decided I could do without.
Minus some socio-behavioral-mental deviation from the norm, and even then considering advances that can be made with therapy...I just don't see it. Why should I be bothered by people on the train when I know that it is possible to just...not?
But it is, like so many of these things, a skill. You have to practice it.
I think that putting earbuds in and checking out of the world around you is a really awful thing to do as your default in life. As a "sometimes" thing it's fine, even healthy. There's a lot of talk of public transit in this thread. If people do it during riding transit, and not really at other times, I'm fine with that. But so many people have their earbuds in before they leave their front door, every day, every week, and they don't come back out.
And I think that's really, really unhealthy, for them and for the rest of us.
In any case, it doesn’t strike me as unreasonable to want to be unbothered, especially in particularly bothersome circumstances. You don’t owe anyone your attention, and the assumption that you do can and is weaponized by everyone from Zuckerberg to the fentanyl addict aggressively demanding your money.
I also don't do any such thing as block the world out in my own head...not really sure where you could have gotten that except perhaps from a misunderstanding of meditation.
The meditation that I and many practice is about peaceful abiding or compassionate awareness. It's about changing our own judgement of reality as it is, not escaping from it.
OTOH, there are people who get sensory overstimulated more easily. Add to that a foreign place, lot of people and chaos around, and even a neurotypical individual can feel anxious.
Putting on headphones and playing Chopin is much more effective than breathing and telling yourself "everythings gonna be ok" in a loop. At least in my experience.
If general public habits shift to the extent that the majority of people with headphones end up only using them for noise cancelling then my behavior would also shift accordingly.
Good for you. I can't. Some people need quiet conditions to focus or sleep and if they don't it feels like active torture.
I think the article pays lip service to this in a paragraph ("social crutch") but otherwise falls into the trap of "societal" pieces (Soft "Why can't we talk to each other anymore ? What is wrong with our cvilisation?")
In my opinion make it a safe enjoyable non-crowded ride and you'll get plenty of interactions.
> just another bourgeoisie wall.
You are not wrong in a way. The base of a lot of the kind of interaction the author of the piece is thinking about is a relatively equal social standing, otherwise there's too much at stake, on both sides. For example, I, a lower middle class man, would have little patience for someone telling me about how much fun they are having taking helicopter rides in the summer and I don't think they'd enjoy my rant about how landlords are evil. Of course I think there's a moral duty to lower yourself from your social standing to care for people who have it rougher than you but it's generally not exactly pleasant like a conversation with someone like-minded could be
Thanks for sharing.
Curious how you project certain assumptions, though. Makes one curious about your own activities.
And why exactly should I give a fuck about people who are trying to bother and inconvenience me?
Noise canceling headphones is the only reason I’m able to use the bus in SF. The author writes from Germany, which has reasonable social etiquette in place in most cities. That social contract just doesn’t exist in large parts of America. In Chicago, they have a real problem with people smoking on public transportation. They don’t make noise canceling headphones for your lungs yet.
The people wearing headphones all day aren’t the ones “losing touch with their neighbors”… no, it’s just that their neighbors are assholes, and they just want to get through the day.
Well, they literally do, they’re just absurd:
I also often have them in while walking around the city for this purpose as well. I usually have the noise canceling off, but if an ambulance or something is coming my way, I quickly click the AirPod to put them into noise canceling mode.
And for walking around - it's the traffic noise that bothers me, not people. Traffic noise can just be so loud along some roads (and at certain times of day) that it makes me not want to walk at all.
Some places aren’t loud but most U.S. cities are. I’m going to Paris this summer, and I probably won’t use AirPods while walking around.
I thought about it and I found that after so many years my mind can just fade the noise out and I doesn't bother me at all. It also helped me to hear selectively. On the other hand, when I wear noise cancelling headphones it feels weird, like detached from the reality I am present.
Only place I prefer to wear them is open plan office. Too many conversations and many grab attention needlessly.
