A Shocking Thing that Almost Nobody Knows
and especially important for parents
At present, I’m testing a new hearing aid product, in order to potentially provide an endorsement. I was voice chatting with some friends in Discord when one of them asked a question about hearing loss. The subsequent conversation made me realize that I’ve never written about something—something important—here. Something all of you, especially those of you who have kids, should know.
There is a very good chance that somewhere between most (as in more than half) and maybe even all hearing loss that Westerners typically experience in their old age can be entirely avoided. It is possible, and in my opinion probable, that there is no such thing as age-related hearing loss, only accumulated noise damage.
In other words, people do not become very hard of hearing in their 60s, 70s, and 80s because they are getting old; they become hard of hearing at those ages (somewhere between largely and entirely) because they have been doing damage to their ears for 60, 70, or 80 years, and the accumulated damage hits a point that interferes with using their ears normally in daily life.
In Shouting Won’t Help: Why I—And 50 Million Other Americans—Can’t Hear You, Katherine Bouton tells her own story of going deaf in her thirties. She lost all hearing in both ears in just a couple of weeks: a shockingly common phenomenon. Millions of Americans have experienced this. (Yes, millions.) She got a cochlear implant and thus has the most hearing technology can offer, but it’s not the same and never will be, and her book provides an excellent introduction on this topic for the lay person with an interest in the topic (whether born of personal experience or not).
In my own case, I don’t know how much hearing I had as a kid. Because I didn’t go to public school, I didn’t get the normal vision and hearing checks that kids get. (This sort of thing is not a priority in unregulated church basement schools that are opened primarily to help churches feel confident that their kids will not become aware that the theory of evolution or people with different religious beliefs exist.)
I know that my hearing wasn’t normal when I was a little kid, because I have many memories of getting punished for “disobeying” parent-uttered or teacher-uttered instructions that I simply didn’t hear. But it was definitely much better than it is now, as I remember using the phone when I was in elementary school. It got worse as time passed. I needed hearing aids that I never could have afforded by the time I was 18 and left home, and got my first good ones during the year I spent living in Vermont and waiting to qualify for in-state tuition. My hearing loss is likely some combination of genes, head trauma, noise damage, and possibly damage from some kind of untreated virus.
As in the vast majority of cases where a person isn’t born deaf, Bouton’s hearing loss is idiopathic.
Idiopathic: the word doctors use when they mean “we don’t have an effing clue.”
Bouton goes into great depth on the many types of hearing loss, the aspects of life that change for late-deafened adults, the risks and benefits of various types of hearing tech, and many aspects of research that simply do not get much coverage. In particular, there are parts of the world where people have perfect hearing into their latest years — no hearing loss at all among people over one hundred years old!
What those parts of the world have in common with each other is pretty simple: they don’t have iPods, headphones, rock concerts, airplanes, construction machinery, car stereos, or other ways to damage their hearing as part of everyday life. Destroying their hearing is not a normal part of life for them, the way it is for us in the west.
Additionally, it is possible that melanin levels in skin play a role in hearing loss: explaining why some are more susceptible than others. There are three reasons why research into hearing loss doesn’t get nearly enough funding and attention. One, the best information we have at present points to melanin being protective (so white people are most at risk). Two, hearing aids cannot, at least at present, be made into a profit center—most insurance doesn’t cover them, and most people think of hearing aids as something for “old people” and as such probably wouldn’t purchase a supplementary rider even if their employer offered “hearing” coverage next to their “vision” coverage. And three, the identity politics movement has some percentage of people with hearing loss making their deafness into part of their identity, so attempts to cure deafness are political hot potatoes. (My take on this is at the end of this essay, since some of you will be curious.)
Here’s a relevant passage (from the Kindle version).
What Parents Owe Their Kids
If you have kids, you owe it to them to protect them from their own stupidity and thus protect their hearing. You can be the reason why your kids hear perfectly into their 60s and beyond. If they’re in a situation with airplanes, construction machinery, or at a concert, make sure they are wearing hearing protection.
On a day to day basis, you can do much more.
Talk to them about this, and then take their devices and use the parental control options to limit the volume. Make sure they cannot set the volume high enough to damage their hearing. YouTube is full of videos to advise you on how to do this. If you still can’t figure it out, email me and I’ll help.
My Take on Cultural/Political Deafness
I know people who identify as culturally Deaf (the capital D is how those people differentiate themselves from people who simply have an audiological hearing loss). They regard themselves as a linguistic minority, with American Sign Language as their primary language, and I do not believe they should be required or pressured to get cochlear implants they don’t want. But I do not believe the more militant members of this group (the ones who call cochlear implants ‘cultural genocide’ and crap like that) represent a mainstream view among deaf people. They get all the attention because we live in a victim-centric culture and they have the most victim-centric take. They are the equivalent of people on the right who want 10-year-old rape victims taken into state custody and forced to give birth or the people on the left who want abortion for no reason legal at nine months: the fringe of the fringe.
Without exception, every Deaf space I’ve ever been in has respected personal choice on this. Many people do not experience their deafness as a disability, and that take is respected, as is the take of people who do experience it as such. People who get their kids a CI and people who don’t are equally regarded as parents making a choice that is theirs to make, with the understanding that when their kids grow up they may disagree and reverse the parents’ choice: refuse to ever use their CI again, or get a CI the minute they’re approved for one.
The Deaf people who get media attention on this are regarded as extremists, even by other d/Deaf people. And many d/Deaf people hate the media for this particular bit of fuckery.
Hating the media: the one thing that still brings Americans together.
About My Substack: I’m a junior data scientist (two years experience and presently job-hunting if you’re hiring). My great love is mathematics, but I also enjoy writing. My posts are mostly cultural takes from a broadly anti-Woke perspective—yes, I’m one of those annoying classical liberals who would’ve been considered on the left until ten seconds ago. Lately I’ve regained a childhood love of reading and started publishing book reviews. My most widely useful essay may be this one, about how to resist the demon of self-termination.
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A lot of ground covered there. Rush Limbaugh, who had a cochlear implant, used to say deafness was the only disability that people got mad at you for.
And on the bright side, my son insisted on wearing hearing protection to his prom this year. Last year he had a really hard time with audio overstimulation. I warned him people might think it’s dorky, but whatever.
Well, the reaction was the opposite. His date, and a few other people, thought it was brilliant and they should have done the same.
I used to work as a live sound engineer mixing concerts. It amazes me how cavalier the attitudes in the industry are toward hearing safety. It's insane how loud many concerts and other events are. I'm not normally a fan of regulation but it's pretty clear to me that the USA needs more safety regulations around the level of amplified sound at events.