The Tragic Cycle Of Wired Headphones: A Self-Reflection

The Tragic Cycle of Wired Headphones: A Self-Reflection

You know that moment when you buy a fresh pair of wired headphones and make a silent promise to yourself? This time will be different. This time, you won’t shove them into your bag like some kind of deranged squirrel hoarding acorns. You won’t yank them out of your phone like you’re trying to start a lawnmower. You will treat them with care, with respect.

And yet.

Somehow.

Here you are. Again. Another pair, dead. The left earbud? Gone. The right one? Hanging on for dear life, whispering faintly, like it’s calling out from the afterlife. You stare at it, baffled. How? HOW did this happen? You were careful. You learned from the last five pairs. Didn’t you?

No. You didn’t.

Because the truth is, you’ve said this every time. Every. Single. Time. Your history is littered with the ghosts of headphones past—frayed wires, sound cutting in and out like a broken radio transmission, rubber casings peeling back to reveal the fragile, suffering wires inside. You think about how they got here. The careless wrapping around your phone. The times you let them dangle from your pocket like an afterthought. The fact that, at least once, you definitely fell asleep with them still tangled around you like a techno-umbilical cord.

And this—this isn’t just about headphones. No. This is about you. About your patterns. Your delusions. The fact that you keep repeating the same mistakes and expecting a different outcome.

Isn’t that the definition of insanity?

Maybe it’s a metaphor. Maybe your headphones die because you don’t handle delicate things well—physical or emotional. Maybe you ignore problems until they break. Maybe you see the warning signs—the faint crackle in the audio, the slightly exposed wire—and you pretend everything’s fine. It’s fine. It’s FINE. Until one day, it isn’t.

Or maybe, hear me out, wired headphones are simply not meant to last. Maybe they are built to self-destruct, to betray us, to force us into this never-ending cycle of grief and rebirth. Maybe we are all just victims of a larger force—planned obsolescence, capitalism, the cruel inevitability of entropy.

Or maybe, just maybe… I need to stop buying $3 gas station headphones and expecting them to last a lifetime.

Anyway. If you see me buying another pair tomorrow, no you didn’t.

I (edit: recently viewed a video indicating that some people may not recognize what an em dash is, and that using it could lead to assumptions of AI usage. I would like to clarify that I do not utilize AI; I merely use an em dash when it is suitable for its intended purpose.)