I keep losing my wireless headphones. When I do have them with me, they’re often out of battery. So one day earlier this summer, I decided to ditch them.
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 approach what feels interesting, exciting, or otherwise potentially rewarding. 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.
I decided to continue my experiment, spending a month commuting without earphones at all.
After a week without them, I started observing fascinating new details about streets that I had walked countless times. One seismic discovery was that the nearest train station to my flat is a two-minute walk away. Google Maps had shown me the longer route, hauling me around the local houses for more than double as long, which in London may as well be wasted hours.
Without headphones, I found myself overhearing bizarre conversations. Like the girl next to me on the train, who had found a Rhode lip gloss in her boyfriend’s car when she is a Rare Beauty girl. She assured her friend that it could not have been her lip gloss because she would never buy anything from Hailey Bieber—after all, she is a long-time Selena Gomez fan. “I can’t believe how Hailey Bieber stole Justin Bieber from Selena Gomez, and now someone else is stealing my man!” she wailed with her head held between her knees and her friend rubbing her back.
Another time, I witnessed a man nearly lose his mind after a stranger accidentally smeared dirt onto his white shoes. The man exploded, yelling at this innocent stranger. It was a captivating fight, and I was absolutely glued. How could this man be fuming about a simple mistake? Imagine if I’d missed the spontaneous subterranean soap opera because I was listening to a podcast.
My absolute favorite eavesdropping moment was when two women in leather outfits and cowboy boots boarded the train and sat opposite me. The woman next to the window said her stressed boyfriend Keith had just bought the couple a flat, so she didn’t feel she could pressure him for an engagement ring. I was glued to their ridiculous conversation and, when they got off, sad that I couldn’t listen in anymore, as her requests were getting more and more ludicrous with every outburst.
“I don’t see him proposing to that nutter!” said the old man next to me, and we shared that rarest of joyous things: a communal laugh.
“Good luck to Keith! Lots going on, poor fella.”
I couldn’t believe I had been missing out on so much drama. Looking back, I realized how rarely I let myself be bored, instead always reaching for distraction.
Psychoanalysis uses the term “reverie” to define a particular kind of constructive, necessary daydreaming, points out Worthy. “In therapy, reveries refer to the daydreams, memories, and associations occurring to the analyst during a session.” A sensitive, attuned analyst interprets those reveries to understand what’s happening between themself and the patient.
If you’ve ever experienced a sudden moment of inspiration in the shower or on a run, if the solution to a sticky problem revealed itself to you spontaneously, you know something of what it means to use reverie. You let your mind unfold in unintentional directions, and your unconscious mind showed you what your conscious mind was missing.
If we’re always moving through the world with headphones in, listening to music or podcasts or books, we’re compromising our mind’s space for revery, says Worthy. There’s less room for the constructive daydreaming our mental processes use for creativity, problem-solving, and synthesizing.
By the end of the month, I had no desire for headphones. When the train got too loud, I would put them on just to cancel the screeching sounds of the metal wheels. But when it got calmer, off they came, and I was ready for the next drama. Now I’m excited for spontaneous comedy to pepper my commute and give me unexpected pick-ups throughout my day.
My friends complain about how people rarely approach each other in London. During my no-headphones experiment, there have been some headlines for me, too: I got asked out on the streets as well as on the tube. Not that it led to anything romantic, but it wouldn’t have happened if I had my headphones on.
