Take Out Your Headphones

We lose a lot if we're constantly tuned in

…and maybe the podcast.

Whatever you listen to on that dreaded fifteen-minute walk to your next tutorial, during which time you must give 200 nods to people you vaguely know and hardly like while the Scottish rain falls freezing on your head — stop. Take out your headphones. There are so many little things you’re missing out on. And we all know it’s the little things in life that make the biggest difference.

A few days ago, I turned down a mate who kindly offered to give me a lift home from Aldi. The lift would have involved a detour for him, and as I said, I like to walk. As I set off down Largo Road I pulled out my headphones as was my habit, then quickly put them away, as is now my habit. This new habit is one I developed after endless months following a routine of finding a few new songs, listening to them until bored, then finding a few more new songs. After enough repetitions of said cycle, even the new songs began to bore me. I felt like I was getting nothing from music anymore, and even podcasts were beginning to grate. So, I decided I would listen to nothing. Yet, I did not find nothing; I found a whole lot of little somethings, little somethings so unique and ordinary that they exist nowhere but in the real world. 

Here’s what I saw and heard on my walk home from Aldi, that I would have never seen or heard had I been listening to music: one, a shirtless blonde guy in grey jeans sprint down a hill, slap a green metal street cabinet, and sprint back up the hill; two, a middle-aged Scottish man hold open a restaurant door and jokingly charge “50p, 50p, 50p” to every person he let through; and three, a girl practicing operatic high notes on South Street, which prompted a bearded man with a toddler to turn around and nod his head, impressed. All three, for different reasons, put a smile on my face. 

Besides occurrences like these, which happen often but not all the time, I find I pay more attention to the world without music playing in my ears. With headphones, I might notice people I know but nothing else (you have no idea how many coffee shops I’m ignorant of because I don’t look), but without them, I notice everyone who passes me. I take stock of every building I walk by — I see the peeling paint, the grand windows on top floors, the wynds between houses that I never knew existed. And I listen to snippets of conversation. 

You might not care about any of these things. You might find five new songs a day and never get bored. You might notice things without hearing them. I understand that. I’m not saying that listening to music on your way to class is a bad thing — music boosts mood, reduces stress, and can even enhance cognitive function — but look at what’s beneath everything that I just told you: What I’m really advocating is connecting with the external world.

It is no secret that in St Andrews, we live in a bubble – hence, The Saint’s ‘Love in the Bubble’ column — and, in the modern world, we increasingly create for ourselves more and more layers of that bubble. Some of you, I’m sure, clock over ten hours a day on your laptops (that’s a bubble), you then pull out your phone and go online (that’s another bubble), and whenever there is a moment when you can’t look down at a screen — because you’re walking or cooking or whatever — you stick in headphones and connect to the digital bubble in that way. It seems like there’s no escape. The outside world is vanishing from our lives. And so, beyond being bored with music, this is why I rarely walk with headphones. It’s an escape from stimulation, a chance to let my mind idle, and an opportunity to decompress.

Try it.

Illustration by Zoe Small