Earbuds, earpods and the cognitive decline.

I KNOW this will sound like I'm crazy or I'm being troll or something, but, even if I get hate, I just thought I should share this here. Many of us thought that people who said about "ELITE BEING PEDOS" were actually the crazy ones, but ended up being way worse. Here's my theory:

I noticed something strange a while ago. I took off my AirPods Pro and went back to the old Apple earphones. Those white ones, with no rubber tips at all, the ones everyone used to make fun of saying they fell out of your ear.

Three days later I was thinking differently, like a part of my brain had been switched back on after years turned off.

Then I started putting the pieces together. You know when you create that bias of “things used to be better back then”? so, I wanted to avoid that, so I started looking at my theory with more skepticism, but, do you remember 2005–2012? Apple at its peak. Steve Jobs alive. iPhone revolutionizing everything. And everyone, LITERALLY everyone who had an iPod used those white earphones that leaked sound like crazy. You could hear the guy’s music on the subway. He could hear you talking. Was it “bad”? Technically yes. But strangely, everyone back then seemed more present. Sharper. Less anxious.

Earbuds with silicone tips that seal 100% of the ear canal only became mainstream around 2013–2015. Today they are practically mandatory. Every “good” headphone has to seal. Has to have noise cancelling. Has to isolate you completely.

Long COVID started showing up strongly in 2020. But the symptoms were: Brain fog. Difficulty concentrating. Executive dysfunction. Cognitive fatigue.

Funny. Those same symptoms have been rising since 2016. Depression skyrocketed. Adult ADHD exploded. Everyone with brain fog.

But wait. Long COVID is viral. How does something that started in 2020 explain an epidemic that’s been going on since 2015?

What if it’s not just the virus? What if it’s something that has already been shutting our brain down for a decade, and COVID just exposed the problem because it hit an entire generation whose prefrontal cortex was already compromised? And here’s why: Spatial hearing is not a minpr function. When you completely seal the ear canal with those rubber tips, you shut down the brain’s ability to map the environment in 360°. You lose the sense of sound depth. Your mind can no longer triangulate where sounds come from. The prefrontal cortex uses spatial hearing to keep a cognitive map of the environment. To keep you alert. To process context. When you remove that not for 20 minutes, but for 6-8 hours a day, every day, for years. you literally atrophy the areas responsible for: Decision making, impulse control, long-term planning, and emotional regulation.

Everything that’s been messed up these last years. And I say this based not only on myself, but on everyone around me. My girlfriend started using these earbuds, and man, she has trouble paying attention to the space around her even without them, and she spends the whole day watching shows after using those little earphones.

My friend, honestly, it even makes me sad to see, he used to be great at math, now he got slow, sure, could it have been something else? maybe… but damn. There’s no study talking about this.

Jobs never wanted headphones that isolated you. He wanted you to hear the music and the world. Because he understood that technology should amplify life, not replace it, and also… one of his strongest ideas was “live the moment, the now”. The EarPods (the ones without rubber) were the last breath of that philosophy as far as I can tell. After he died, Apple became like everyone else because obviously the competition came with earbuds like that. And we bought them. Literally. I’m not saying in-ear headphones cause long COVID. I’m saying an entire generation spent 10 years (in)voluntarily shutting down one of the most important brain functions for spatial and executive cognition. And when a virus that affects cognitive function arrived, we were already vulnerable, it just amplified it. Try the test. One week with open earbuds. No rubber tips. No noise cancelling.