It is an interesting thing to see trends come back from your own youth. I had always thought that it would be years and years before I experienced this — I’ve had visions of me making fun of my children for wearing baggy pants and Adidas sneakers in thirty years. However, I have begun noticing an old trend resurfacing among my peers as I walk across campus. Yes, college reader, we are old enough to have trends resurface and the newly resurrected trend is headphones with wires.
I first noticed this growing rejection of bluetooth while sitting in Zeus drinking my coffee. As I’m sure you know, if you’re familiar with Cornell’s campus, a lunchtime table at Zeus is prime real estate for trend scouting. As my eyes scoured the atrium to inspect my peers’ daily styling choices, I noticed an abundance of people, but men in particular, sporting long wires stringing from the pockets of their thrifted Carhartt jackets or snaking up through the collars of their graphic tees. I sat wondering, “Why the switch?” It seemed only recently that I had saved enough money to pay for my airpods that had my mind boggled by the noise cancelling and the sound quality.
I thought at first that it might be the beginning of a pretentious aesthetics movement. In the same way that there was likely a boy in your highschool who insisted that vinyl was the only correct way to listen to music only to later prowl the halls with a used SONY walkman playing a brand-new Smiths cassette tape. Or in the way that men who live in Bushwick choose to not own bed frames because they think the room looks better that way. I spoke with my friends later about this, and they basically all agreed that the decision to ditch wires is a ploy to stand out and cultivate an “indie” vibe. Perhaps the purpose of the lesser-quality wires was to blast Clairo loud enough that an indie girl could hear it playing in the next seat over.
I thought about this for the rest of the day though, and I came to an entirely different conclusion about the revival of this trend. It couldn’t just be that all of these people were sacrificing sound quality for an aesthetic. After all, it wouldn’t be long before even a novice audiophile became tired of the muffled quality that more rudimentary headphones produce. It took a bit more thinking to reach the following verdict: that perhaps the shift back to wired headphones is a nostalgia for a simpler time where people my age could leave the house without being concerned about the wellbeing of their technological ecosystem. The daily routine of charging bluetooth headphones and patting down your own pockets to make sure you haven’t lost them is admittedly tedious and inconvenient. Wired headphones are easily replaceable and are convenient — replacing them will run you about twenty bucks, they do not lose battery and they are virtually attached to your phone at all times.
It has been assumed that college-age Gen Z’ers are obsessed with the “next best thing.” The return to wired headphones proves that assumption to be incorrect. Young people on campuses now recognize that new is not always better. This revival of an old listening device is different from the aforementioned person who only listens to vinyl or cassette tapes because that choice is categorically inconvenient. This choice points to a larger desire to return to a simpler time when the priority was listening to as much music as possible, not the newest, flashy device that you could listen to music with.
Caitlin Gallagher is a junior in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. She can be reached at cmg323@cornell.edu.
