As someone who grew up mostly in the UK, I thought I had a handle on our societal dos and don’ts. Yet, the rise of a new, baffling behaviour has left me feeling off kilter. While I accept that social norms evolve over time, this one has me battening the hatches.
You must have noticed it: people on public transport, playing sounds – music, videos, you name it – out loud rather than through headphones, meaning that if you’re on the same train carriage or bus, you’re subjected to the whims of their TikTok algorithm or their obscure EDM mash-up.
This, I think, is a broadly post-Covid-19 phenomenon. I was initially willing to give people the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps successive lockdowns have led them to forget that other people exist, I mused. Soon enough, I thought, their faculties will return, and they’ll be overcome with the crippling (but necessary) self-consciousness that keeps us all in our lanes and the world turning.
Alas, I was wrong. Nearly seven years since the pandemic began, the behaviour is not just lingering but nigh-on normal – to the extent that legal penalties are now being brought in to curb it. Local transport companies will be given guidance allowing them to issue fines of £100 for “headphone dodging”, along with other nuisances like vaping and littering. Train operators already have the power to issue fines of up to £1,000 for similar behaviour, and my recent railway journeys don’t offer much hope that such penalties alone are an effective deterrent.
Good news, then, that the fines will be accompanied by a public awareness campaign, under the slogan “share the carriage, not the noise”. Amen to that – because while financial disincentives probably help to underline the point at hand, this isn’t a question of slapping wrists. Rather, we’ve got to engineer a behavioural sea change, which means shifting attitudes.
It’s a tall order, but there’s no time to lose – after all, every day that the guy opposite me on the Elizabeth line continues to scroll uninterrupted through pseudoscience videos with AI voiceovers at full volume is another day that the worst people in Britain are eroding its standards until finally what was once unthinkable is insidious, embedded.
Customs don’t emerge overnight. They require years of repetition to be compounded enough that we take them for granted, for better or for worse. Before these interventions, headphone-dodging was on precisely that trajectory – an increasingly normal part of using public transport in the 2020s, no matter how wildly disrespectful it seemed.
And at the risk of sounding dramatic, the consensus that other people have feelings is probably the bare minimum required to keep civilisation ticking over, y’know? Do away with headphones and before you know it, we’re all wrestling for scraps of rotisserie chicken round the back of the big Sainsbury’s and burning furniture to stay warm.
What I’m saying is: “Grow up and put your bloody headphones in.” Though, I suppose “share the carriage, not the noise” is a politer way of putting it.