We Don't Need to Hear Whatever's Playing on Your Phone

A woman in blue scrubs is finally getting some shut-eye after a long shift at the hospital. She has mastered the urban art of sleeping upright in a packed PUV, her head moving in sync with the driver's push and pull on the gas pedal. Next to her, a young professional stares blankly out the window, likely dissociating after 10 hours of looking at an Excel spreadsheet. We’re 30 minutes into another Friday night traffic jam, and most of us are exhausted, eager to go home, but stuck. Our only consolation is that shared silence under the flickering fluorescent lights of the e-jeep.

But that peace is broken when a man in his 20s pulls out his phone and starts scrolling. The traffic light turns from green to red—again. Suddenly, the passengers are treated to three seconds of a high-pitched chipmunk voice (cue: "Welcome to my vlog!"), an EDM transition, an aggressive laugh track, some lo-fi beats, then 10 seconds of an intrusive advertisement. It's a broken symphony of reels that the guy isn't even watching. His thumb flicks upward with the rhythm of a dopamine addict. One swipe after the other, one unfinished audio track before the next.

Everyone just becomes an auditory hostage to this man's mish-mash of trending garbage. The healthcare professional sits up, startled from her nap. The corporate slave looks at the culprit with a weary glare. Where are your goddamn earphones?—they think, but never say.

When did it become okay for people to watch videos and listen to blaring music without earphones, or worse, take a phone call on speaker? (Maybe we don’t need to hear your kumare’s chismis, Marites.) Wearable audio tech is more advanced than ever—we have evolved from the era of broken-bass headphones with flimsy steel bands to sleek, present-day earbuds—yet it seems we have simply stopped wearing them.

When did the communal environment become a personal living room? And more importantly, when did we decide that the basic etiquette of a public sphere was a relic of the past, as obsolete as the headphone jack itself?

The Internet, as usual, has more than a handful of reasons why this is happening, with most of them pointing toward technological advances. Or rather, technological excuses.

The removal of the headphone jack itself is seen as a primary culprit. Apple led the execution as early as 2016, and it wasn't long before Android followed suit. Smartphone users suddenly had to purchase wireless alternatives, which are usually more expensive and easier to lose, especially when you regularly commute via public transport. Drop one half of your earbud pair on a crowded bus, and best believe you'll never find it again.

Connecting to Bluetooth can also be a challenge for the less technologically savvy. It took years for elders to learn how to navigate a smartphone; now we expect them to fumble through settings and sync devices just to take a call from their sons and daughters living abroad? (But then again, maybe we do expect that. Maybe we don't need to hear those agawan-ng-lupa conversations while we’re just trying to survive rush hour.) But what about those who are obviously capable enough to stick a hands-free device to their ear?

I grew up with the universal hand gesture for a telephone as one’s pinky and thumb sticking out in opposite directions—the "shaka"—held to the ear. So I cannot understand the modern trend of holding a glass-and-metal brick horizontally in front of one's face, while the audio from the other end blares at full volume. It’s not even a FaceTime conversation; it’s just a regular call turned into a public broadcast.

Then there is the pandemic—the convenient scapegoat for every modern social decay, though perhaps for good reason. That global clusterfuck didn't just steal years from our lives; it effectively dismantled our collective social muscle. By isolating us within our four walls, it turned our private habits, especially doomscrolling, into our only habits. Most damagingly, it disrupted the formative years of an entire generation, robbing them of the crucial, public conditioning required to develop a functional social sense. After years of living in a digital bubble—attending classes and meetings online or joining virtual happy hours—many have simply forgotten, or never learned, how to exist in a space that doesn't belong entirely to them.

It doesn’t help that our brains have been rewired to operate in this always-on culture. For most people, sitting still for the duration of a commute has become an unbearable problem, and swiping through a feed is the most convenient distraction. We have lost the ability to be bored, and in our desperation to escape the silence of a traffic jam, we force our distractions onto everyone else. Others can’t even wait to step out of the vehicle to listen to audio messages or catch up on missed calls.

The reality is that nobody—literally nobody—wants to hear whatever you're playing on your phone. Your TikTok feed is not a public service announcement, and your FaceTime argument is not a soap opera we’ve tuned in to watch. And while you may have the coolest playlist blaring from your Spotify, we're already begrudgingly listening to the EDM beats aboard a patok jeep, and we don't need another stimulus to trigger a migraine.

If you can afford a smartphone and a data plan, you can afford a cheap pair of earphones. And unless it's a matter of life and death, answer that call at home and place that phone beside your ear like a normal person.

For the sake of every tired passenger in the already shitty commute with you.

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