Earphones All Around

You know what an earphone is. Those grammatically correct among you might have this urge to say earphones but you get what I mean.

All of us own one. If you have bought a phone or if you just own a phone you have a pair of earphones. Or at least had until those little guys got lost somewhere in this big world or died to natural causes or an accident.

Earphones I believe is just as revolutionary as the smartphone. It allows us to listen to what we like while being in the middle of a crowd without letting anyone around us know about it.

It’s a must have in our current world. Some of you might have earphones (or headphones or airbuds or other variations) in your ear right now which you clearly don’t need it to read this. It has become a culture of some sort to have earphones on your ear.

Staring out with earphones on

On those long bus rides of the past, we get to hear stories about how our parents or their friends, made new friends with the people sitting besides them. Or how someone found their life partner on the bus ride. We can find those things in the stories we read from many different writers.

But where is all that now? We will still hear a few incident here and their from our friends but most of the time it is just not there. We hardly even realize that someone we know has boarded the same bus as us, let alone talking with some random stranger besides us.

We would rather listen to the songs or podcasts that we know and enjoy than put ourselves in an uncomfortable position of talking to someone else.

We would rather be texting someone somewhere else. Staying in our comfort zone and not venturing out in the unknown. How many meaningful conversations have we missed by being engulfed in our own space created by those earphones in a crowded public space?

Are those earphones really that necessary? Can’t we take in what is going on in our surrounding? Why is it so important to listen to the same thing repeatedly instead of listening to what is going on around us?

Some of you might argue that you are an introvert and you don’t want to talk to people on the bus. But won’t it be more fun to learn about someone else instead of listening to the same old music. What if someone in the seat in front of you is telling his/her seat partner an exciting story in some remote place he has recently visited?

No matter how introverted you can never have enough of a good story. Besides someone once said “The greatest gift of an introverted story teller is the ability to eavesdrop on others which an extrovert lacks.”

But how will learn of a story when you are too busy being lost in the world of yours inside that little head between one earphone to the another.