Every untangling was a small toll on my mind. Before I could start listening, I had to untangle the mess, plug in the headphone jack and then start consuming.
And that toll did two things.
First, the default was NOT to listen. If I was waiting in a queue, or walking somewhere, it just wasnโt worth taking out the tangled mess. So I didnโt. I just stood there. Being
bored was the default.
Second, when I did listen, it was a choice. โIs this worth untangling right now?โ Most times, the answer was still yes. But I was still deciding.
AirPods set this toll to absolute zero. Now there is no empty moment. Open the case, pop them in, and poof, I am in my doomscrolling world, or listening to a podcast I know I will
not remember the next day. And of course they even have transparency mode. So you can walk/cycle/run without getting worried. Never stopping the consumption.
...
A helpful reminder that convenience comes with trade-offs. And sometimes those trade-offs are side-effects of the convenience itself.
Like: how convenient is it to be always online? Near-ubiquitous high-speed WiFi and a powerful computer with a cellular Internet connection in our pockets for the rest of
the time! And what does it mean? It means that when they connection is slow, flaky, or absent - the default three states for the Internet of only a couple of decades ago! - we're
lost. We forget things. We forget how to look things up. We forget how to communicate.
But it's not even just that with headphones. "Buds" have other tradeoffs too:
They're easier to lose.
Worse, they're easier to lose just one of the pair.
And they're more-expensive to replace when you do.
They require charging.
As the golden-ears audiophiles will tell you (although this probably doesn't matter to normal human beings), they necessarily reduce fidelity because there's (often) an extra
analog-to-digital and then digital-to-analogue conversion.
You can't just plug them into a "splitter" to listen together to a mixtape with your bestie on a long bus ride.
I don't often miss the 5mm jack that's absent from my (current) phone, but just sometimes I do. And today, Akshay reminded me of a few reasons why.
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