"We’re becoming more persona-dominated. We all put on an act about how people want to see and hear us. We do it all the time on social media."

"Human beings evolved in small hunter-gatherer groups where everyone knew one another. We aren’t necessarily adapted to be interacting with strangers all the time. People find it incredibly tiring. At least in a taxi, you have an opportunity to sit and be quiet."

Said the clinical psychologist Paul Gilbert, quoted in "Hit the mute button: why everyone is trying to silence the outside world/Uber is trialling a feature that allows customers to stop their drivers from talking. But there’s growing evidence that cutting ourselves off like this isn’t healthy" (The Guardian).

One Uber driver quoted in the article says that even without that Uber shush feature, he can tell who wants chitchat. There are outward signs: "Most people have their earphones on anyway. I usually have my Bluetooth earphone in too." And he wants to listen to "audiobooks, lectures, radio, podcasts, educational stuff."

The author of the article, Richard Godwin, observes that headphones — "retreat into our own discrete sound worlds" — are essentially a mute button. He looks around in his office and sees half of his colleagues isolating their heads under headphones. There's a term for this, "the privatization of auditory space." A lecturer in sonic anthropology observes that we have eyelids but not earlids, and "We don’t have any control over what drips into our ears and collects in them. Earphones are the closest we have to that."

A neuroscientist explains another sight-versus-hearing distinction: "When you look at an object, it appears to be out there in the world. But sounds, for most of us, feel like they’re emanating from within our heads. It makes them more intimate and more intrusive." But sound from headphones is even more intimate and feels even more like it's coming from within your head.

There's so much isolation from your surroundings, so many chance encounters averted, so much commitment to the belief that what's in your personal presence is negative or at least dull and unworthy of attention. You've got to replace it with substance from elsewhere.

This subject made me think of Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man":

Well, you walk into the room
Like a camel and then you frown
You put your eyes in your pocket
And your nose on the ground
There ought to be a law
Against you comin’ around
You should be made
To wear earphones

Dylan had the idea of forcing  the thin man ("Mr. Jones") to go under the earphones, but today all the Mr. Joneses put their earphones in voluntarily. The Guardian article characterizes them as muting the world around them, but from the Dylan perspective, they are muting themselves and ridding him of their unwanted existence. Who's muting whom?

Here's a related article from last month in The Atlantic, "What Happens When You Always Wear Headphones/I decided to noise-cancel life" by Olga Khazan.

Like many other Americans, I now wear AirPods all day at my desk to combat the awful tyranny of the open office.... Right now I’m sitting in an airport. Three bearded men are chuckling next to me, and they look like a buddy comedy with the sound muted. It’s delicious.... My boyfriend, the cello owner, makes little noises while he putters around... So I noise-cancel him too....

I realize the dangers inherent in this overall trend—I might even go so far as to call it “socially alienating” and “destructive of relationships”—but I nevertheless feel it’s inexorable. At this point, everything is curated—except, of course, what we hear.... [I]t feels good to draw a private, firm border... Just like we choose everything else, I choose exactly what to put in my ears. All other noise is canceled.

So much choice, but you can't choose to be around people who are not canceling you.

And, more recently in The Atlantic: "The Case for Wearing AirPods All the Time
The inconspicuous buds might make friendly interactions awkward, but they can also provide protection in dangerous situations" (by Marina Koren):

But something’s missing in the lamentation over the Apple buds and their erosion of social norms. There’s actually a very good reason for wearing AirPods all the time, even at the risk of offending someone: to safely ignore street harassers.

The currency of street harassers is attention—they want it, and they act as if they’re entitled to it. Leaving your AirPods in while ordering at Starbucks is rude, because the barista at the counter is owed some common courtesy. Wearing them on your commute to pretend you didn’t hear that nasty comment is not, because the harasser isn’t owed anything at all....

Headphones act as both cue and barrier; they convey an air of unavailability that warns strangers not to bother and provide a membrane of protection when someone decides to anyway. Suspended in a state of plausible aloofness, people with headphones plugged in their ears can pretend they didn’t hear those comments and keep on walking....

In this view, the world around you is negative, but the feared negativity is merely aural — verbal harassment. Ironically, it's simultaneously sunny: She's only afraid people will say things, not that she's vulnerable to physical assault. Headphones also say I can't hear you coming up behind me and my mind is in a dream world.

For some, AirPods aren’t the same blazing do-not-disturb sign as other kinds of headphones. Their inconspicuous design, while convenient, can be easy to miss, and their users try to remedy that. “I make a pretty distinct effort to keep my hair pulled back so that people see that I have them in,” says Maggie Powers, an advertising consultant in Boston....

Imagine changing your hairstyle because you want to say "Hey, look, I'm wearing earphones!" Why not go bold and walk down the street with your fingers in your ears and chant "La la la, I'm not listening"?

Sometimes, the stranger trying to get your attention, mouthing muffled words and miming removing the buds from your ears, just wants directions, or to ask some other benign question. But for many people, the desire to avoid a bad experience... wins out....

No, you really are always choosing which bad experience to prioritize avoiding. And your choices are limited by what other people are choosing to avoid. In Koren's personal world, the #1 problem seems to be catcalling. It's actually a pretty nice world if that's your biggest problem, men uttering compliments and sexual offers. And here you are rearranging your head and your hair for them. Is that liberation? Another way to rearrange your head is to build the capacity to ignore. Just act like you didn't hear that. That's a stronger message to guys who think they can get your attention than sticking man-made objects into your bodily orifices.