So here’s a fun milestone nobody wants to hit: my hearing’s genuinely gone downhill. I’ve suspected it for years (you know that thing where you keep asking people to repeat themselves and they start giving you that look?), but it all got properly real earlier this year when tinnitus decided to move in permanently. A trip to the audiologist confirmed what I already knew. High-pitched sounds have basically ghosted me. Turns out I’m now officially a candidate for hearing aids, which feels like one of those adulting moments nobody warns you about.
My Samsung phone has an “adapt sound” feature that allows you to train it on your hearing, and the graph it created for me a couple of years ago looked very like the one the audiologist created.
Anyway, enough about my failing biology. How’s your hearing holding up? I stumbled across this completely unscientific but of course compelling YouTube video that tests what frequencies you can still detect, and let me tell you it was humbling. I couldn’t hear anything past about 6400Hz. It could be my headphones, I suppose, but I know it’s not. Not really.
Look, I’m not here to lecture you, but seriously: wear ear plugs. Protect your ears. Future you will thank present you for not being stubborn about it. Learn from my mistakes and all that.