I live in Headphone Country, where the sidewalks are narrow and the landscape lacks any surprise. I make sure to carry my headphones on every walk because they make the lived environment bearable. You don't listen to ambient music or Miles Davis on your walk through Headphone Country. You blare Emotion Side B by Carlie Rae Jepsen while you hop past a bar that you have driven past several times, but are noticing for the first time, thanks to the clarity attained from your long strides and the heart-swelling voice of Ms Jepsen.
In the 1980s, Jean Baudrillard visited America several times and described driving through the vast freeways and deserts as "a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated." - Long walks in Headphone country have the same texture. RIP Baudrillard - you'd have loved walking across Austin wearing Apple Airpods Pro Max.
A long stroll without headphones in Headphone Country has the quality of an unanticipated mid-afternoon nap. The barren concrete below your shoes and the trees that look like the creation of someone playing Minecraft do little to inspire or stimulate. Your attention gently turns inward to the emotional and physical aches of seasons gone by. The girl who ghosted you after 5 dates, the knocking sound emanating from your right knee, that time you didn't have enough money to make rent. It starts to feel like slow-motion suicide.
Not all places where people wear headphones on a walk count as Headphone Country. The headphones have to be additive to the environment for that to be the case. For example, in New York City, wearing headphones is a means to subtract away from the stimulating, often exhausting streets. The music or the podcast in your headphones dulls the chaos and gives you distance. So what if rent is expensive? The space between your ears will always belong to you. I like to imagine that the folks wearing sunglasses and headphones on the subway, looking stoic and ice cold, are listening to "Ambient West Texas Sounds for the Subway."
Headphone country is a place that feels like every other place. You tend to notice the same things on your walks here. There are the streets with rows of newly built houses that all look square and white, their impeccable stretch across the street only interrupted by a run-down house with 4 dogs and the inevitable flamingo ornaments in the front yard. There is always the moment when you realize you have taken a wrong turn and this is proven right by the sight of a bus stop bustling with homeless people in various states of distress. But the crowning jewel of headphone country is the highway overpass that separates you from the one decent bookstore in town that you mapped your walk to. If driving through the freeway is a spectacular form of amnesia, walking under the freeway overpass is the art of bringing everything you wanted to ignore into sharp focus - the smell of decay, the abandoned grocery cart perched precariously on the median, the man who seemed to have lived all his life under the overpass glaring at you, the unwelcome intruder. You know that every person driving by is wondering how your life got to the point where you find yourself walking under an overpass. Thank god for headphones.
I read a review about how the Apple Vision Pros are excellent for getting work done on economy in Airplanes. Talking about the "space" that vision pros afford you in an otherwise cramped plane, the reviewer writes, "It was really freeing to basically be "spread out" as far as my computing and entertainment went and to feel good about the fact I wasn't bothering anyone else and that no one could see my screen." Then the review goes on to lament the pricing "Folks living in close proximity to others, or even flying in the back of a plane, may not have the wherewithal to spend $3,500 on a personal TV. Those that do are probably more likely to have a traditional home theater or fly in seats with a bit more privacy. That, though, is only a problem for now (and, I might note, a real opportunity for Meta's significantly lower-priced Quest)"
Just like headphones made a lot of otherwise unremarkable places walkable, perhaps the cheaper iteration of the Vision Pros will make virtually unlivable places reasonable to live and walk in. Places like Bakersfield, California or Freeport, Lousiana, where the skyline is plumes of smoke and the best weather forecast you can hope for is "grey." if I was living in Bakersfield right now, working in a chemical plant and putting my untouched mechanical engineering degree to use, I'd have shelled out 3500 dollars that I couldn't spare to experience a better reality. That seems like a reasonable amount to pay. People casually spend double that amount on therapy every year with the hope that reframing events in the past would improve their present reality.
I once met an Asian guy in his mid-20s who worked in an oilfield somewhere in the West Texas desert. I asked him what he did on the weekends and he said he plays video games and goes to the one McDonald's in town. When I enquired about friends, he laughed and said, "I'm the only Asian guy in a 50-mile radius, people look at me weird". Punching down on technology is a popular sport these days, and people like Elon Musk make it easy to do so. But you can only hate technology as long as you have access to your privileged form of reality, up until when you are the only Asian guy in a 50-mile radius.