Noise cancelling headphones; a London necessity

A Commuter writes

I am strongly against people self diagnosing  with mental conditions because I believe allowing categories like ‘ADHD’ or ‘autism’ to become part of your identity sets personal expectations of failure. It is impossible to succeed socially or professionally if you believe you have immutable deficiencies and handicaps compared to ‘normal people’.

You will, in the course of life, meet many people who categorise themselves as ‘depressed’ or ‘anxious’. Once these narratives become part of your internal monologue it is extremely difficult to extricate yourself from the pits of wallowing despair. We observe much the same pattern with young girls who don’t fit in socially finding out about ‘trans’ from the internet or teachers and thus being the tumble down a path towards self destruction. They take on the label of being gender non-conforming and it steals decades from their lives, sometimes even their fertility. In the 1990s they would have made their personality about liking Sylvia Plath and liquorice rizzla papers. Alas.

We were all be better off when such terms did not exist. When spells of isolation and sadness were taken as the usual course of life, and ‘weird kids’ were not encouraged to other themselves even further.

I have met many young men who did not play sport in early childhood (disinterested father usually, no male sibling) and so were uncoordinated by the time they reached primary school. The foam balls soaring around during ‘bench ball’ made them flinch, but the other boys could catch it gracefully. Humiliation often leads such boys to reflexive sour grapes, ‘oh those silly brutes with their Football!’

Against the backdrop of 2000s hypochondria, they were told by parents and teachers that this inadequacy was the result of something called ‘dyspraxia’. Instead of practicing throwing tennis balls in the garden they had their lack of socialisation medicalised, a narrative that follows them through their early lives. They can’t cycle, they never learn to drive. Many can’t swim. They never take part in a team sport. Their entire physical interface with the world is filtered through the assumption of inherent incompetence. It is impossible to be self-confident in public/social environments with this handicap, which is why many such young men resort to the ‘digital’ interface.

‘Naturally’ bad at running, but you can plug in the Marathon Perk on Modern Warfare Two. Here, unlike in school, failure is anonymous. A 0.37 KD for three months is less embarrassing than not being passed to on ‘the field’ during lunch time football, thus bridging the initial skill curve inherent to all organised games.

The truth about 95% of people who consider themselves a label like autistic or dyspraxic (and there are cases where it’s real) simply missed a formative experience which made them fall behind other children, an effect which compounded itself over time. None would have described ‘Genie’ as inherently ‘dysarthic’ on account of her inability to speak. I do not say this from a position of condescension, I had to overcome many such obstacles during adolescence. Do not listen to the Munchausers School Marms or the HBD nerds: your difficulties are not inherent.

You can learn co-ordination through practice. Some of the most dedicated gym-going Norwoods are people who learned about weightlifting from Bodybuilding.com c.2010 - social outsiders who attained self confidence from an individual sport that they could learn about online and min-max alone. Seeing yourself do an exercise competently shatters the illusion of predetermined failure. The internet has moved on from /fit/ since then (a topic worthy of it’s own article) and there is nothing more embarrassing than an internet addict/troll trying to give his followers life advice, so just a word of caution: If you do choose this path, whatever you do, please please please do NOT bulk, or you will get stuck in the ‘Sam Hyde Trap’ of being physically repulsive but large on account of your endless eating.

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Right, now having said all of that, I have actually diagnosed myself with ‘misophonia’. Sensitivity to sounds. The sound of eating has always unnaturally enraged me (as I child I used to eat on the stairs to avoid hearing my family eat). I suspect everybody hates ‘some’ sounds, but getting a train without earphones and having to listen to someone eat an entire share bag of crisps is worse than hell for me. This isn’t a Very British Problem; I have more than unpleasant visions of what I would do to the ‘Thai Sweet Chilli’ scoffer in the Quiet carriage. I do my best not to let this peculiarity spill out and do others harm, aside the occasional grumble and pointed ‘look’.

One of the reasons I am eternally grateful for being born at this period of time is the earphone, a wonderful device that has made urban living 5x better by providing the means for splendid atomisation. I find it curious how little has been written about this social-scientific transformation. So much has been said of the cultural impact of records being digitised and what this meant for funding flows writ labels, artists and Spotify. But surely music becoming a passive tool for drowning out the outside world as opposed to something actively ‘listened to’ was a greater change? I remember thinking the ‘cool’ teenagers in the German textbooks going to their rooms to listen to music seeming very outdated by the time I was in School. ‘Um 15 Uhr gehe ich in mein Zimmer, um Rammstein zu hören.’ Yeah.

A lost case of AirPod pros in the last two weeks has brought the acuity of Urban Decline in London in to even sharper relief. We seem to have reached a saturation point where every single tube carriage, every single bus and train has at least one person either playing tik toks out loud or shouting some garbled international patois in to the Loudspeaker (what are these people actually talking about? These lives of feckless indolence surely cannot merit unending streams of consciousness).

The stern, businesslike forty somethings of the 2010s who I remember telling these jackals to be quiet seem to have disappeared. Perhaps they’ve given up. There comes a point where the low level misbehaviour is so widespread that the risk of getting stabbed cannot be taken every time you take public transport. So you either suffer through it, humiliated, or you pop in the noise cancelling earphones and look the other way.

Did earphones contribute to a lack of general public manners by making inexcusable behaviour easier to avoid? I’ve seriously fantasised about being able to partially blind myself for my commute so I don’t have to look at other passengers vaping, chewing gum and generally looking disgusting.

If Google Glasses are ever Delivered on, I suspect there will be an option to filter your visual environment in real time to your taste, a sort of virtual reality; Peter Hitchens will be able to see London as women in petticoats, children in shorts, the air will be chilly and the Burger King in Paddington station will be selling ham and mustard sandwiches. I will see only beautiful young people, the district line will look like a University ‘apres’ ski trip. Aaronovitch will walk through Woolwich and see the Britain that the BBC invented for him; African women in wonderful colourful dresses hawking plantain to Pakistani women with hijabs made from poppies. Perhaps this filter would also render anyone behaving anti-socially as a young white man, as depicted in the fictionalised universe of Sadiq Khan’s ‘Maaate’ campaign.

And all around us, the real world will continue to become more atrocious. The tracksuits will proliferate. Waistlines expand.  Addicts throw up on the stairwells of express supermarkets. Levantine butchers open where once East Londoners drank their pints of pale ale. Vape shops where once there were Daunt Books.

And by divine mercy, we will be blind to it all.

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Below is from the Wikipedia page of Herbert Morrison, a prominent Labour minister during the Attlee car-crash and grandfather of Peter ‘Mandy’ Mandleson.

I apologise to readers for not progressing with the campaign on social housing vigorously enough. There has been some excellent work on this recently, particularly regarding ONS data and the London Borough of Islington. I feel momentum. It is not lack of willing on my part; some regular readers and tweeters Voiced Concerns about the ethics of posting screenshots of Twitter on Substack.

To that end, I now ask that tweeters include the hashtag #CleanUpTheCapital in tweets about Social housing; I will take this as explicit consent for your tweets to be screenshotted and shared on this platform.