It felt like a huge step, as I’d long used in-ear tech as a shield from the auditory chaos of London. But what happened felt transformative. I was surprised at how present I was without them.
During my first headphones-free commute, I smiled at strangers. I noticed the stops on the train line, something I never do when I rely on an app to tell me when to get off the train through my earphones. That one journey made me wonder if I had accidentally outsourced the joys of my city life to my phone.
In 2026, we have become remarkably good at filling every quiet moment: Spotify on the train, podcasts while walking, Google Maps telling us where to go, our phones providing something to look at whenever there’s a lull. The scale of this is striking. Ofcom’s latest research found that 93% of U.K. adults listen to some form of audio every week, and more than a quarter listen to podcasts weekly.
Hundreds of millions of people worldwide listen to podcasts. There’s also a fascinating social angle. Research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that people often avoid talking to strangers because they underestimate how enjoyable those interactions will be.
And research into constant smartphone connectivity published in Current Directions in Psychological Science suggests that our devices can cause us to miss the emotional benefits of casual interactions by effectively replacing them. It turns out that there might be a psychological reason why being without headphones has felt so unthinkable. Psychotherapist Jack Worthy tells me that our earliest impulses as newborns are approach and avoidance.
We avoid whatever feels dangerous, disgusting, or boring.” Our emotional life proceeds from these drives, and these drives evolved to promote our survival and success. Our headphones give us the power to dial in to highly appealing experiences and tune out everything we’d rather avoid in the environment. If our homes serve as refuge from the outside world, our headphones create a tidy micro-environment inside our heads.
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