The World Health Organisation is here to rescue your ears folks, which is timely seeing as their new estimations suggest more than 1 billion of you young’uns are in the danger zone for hearing loss thanks to all those super cool portable devices that are around these days.
If you’re sitting there feeling all mature and therefore safe from foolish young people things, sorry but you’re not exempt. Turns out anyone cranking it up on the headphones for more than 90 minutes a day is taking a big risk with their hearing. According to the ABC, National Acoustic Laboratories did a study in 2017 that found 1 in 10 Aussies have their headphones over 85 decibels on the reg. In real people terms, that’s like standing next to a powered up lawn-mower.
Right now about 1 in 6 of us have some degree of hearing loss, and those numbers are expected to rise to 1 in 4 by 2050 thanks to our ageing population and complete disregard for our eardrums.
I am 100% one of those people so I have no right to judge, and I’m only just realising how ridiculous that is. A LAWN MOWER? But in my defence I need it that loud because I already destroyed my hearing from being front row at too many gigs without ear plugs (because, um, how uncool). But is hearing loss cool? Do you actually wanted that weird high-pitched post-gig ringing to be all you hear for the rest of your life? No, no you do not. So we should all take heed.
But I am also still definitely going to listen to my headphones on the walk home tonight, like the idiot I am ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
