While not perfect, hearing aids can help restore clarity, connection, and independence.
By Eric Steinert
Credit: @quanle2819/Unsplash
At first it was just mumbling. The teenage barista, for instance, sounded like static broadcasting through a foam wall: “D’ya wanna ’medium a latte, ’old or ’ot?” I stood there mentally decoding a basic question.
Accents, dialects, and soft voices are unintelligible. On bad days, I genuinely wanted to carry a mini whiteboard and a black Sharpie: Could you repeat what you said? And speak slowly, please. I write one letter at a time.
But the apex of hearing hopelessness is a crowded restaurant on a Friday night, where mangled conversations are the essential ambience. Crowded tables with hungry people, a cacophony of competitive crosstalk. I must be in an aviary.
Two, three, four friends at a table racing to fill a story. I come prepared for inflated exuberance. The gossip is so juicy, the punchline so funny, and voices climb an octave to out-amplify the classic rock from the overhead speakers.
If irony were for sale, we’d all be rich. We pay premium prices to sit in dining rooms specifically to communicate, yet the room itself makes communication nearly impossible.
Then comes the obligatory menu review, an arms race of staccato dialogue: “Oh, the beef Wellington looks delicious. No, you have to get the salmon, it’s much better for—you know Jerry had the haddock the other night and couldn’t stop—check out the house specials. This place is known for—it’s prepared with too much cream—you’ll regret—I thought Jerry was a vegetarian! Oh, my neighbor raves about…” Amid the headlong rush of bonhomie, you’re actually drowning in a sea of half-sentences.
Let me tell you what really sucks in these moments: hearing aids.
No, it’s not that they don’t help. The technology is a marvel. It’s simply that hearing aids are no substitute for the human ear.
It would be far easier if we were actually taught how hearing works from an early age. You may have noticed that hearing rarely merits a chapter in high school health class. You learn those other essentials of adolescence, and perhaps walk away with a better understanding of personal hygiene.
But hearing? Hah, unlike your eyesight, it’s harder to establish a baseline to catch the first signs of hearing loss. Students will probably get their eyes checked annually.
Yet, hearing is the sense that just flies under the radar. We first get our eyes checked while in school, and schedule an appointment with an audiologist much later in life. Hearing is the neglected sense that diminishes slowly before anyone bothers to take action.
To understand why hearing is fragile, you have to look at the biology. Deep inside the inner ear are roughly 15,000 sensory hair cells. Each of these cells possesses an even tinier cluster of microscopic hairs.
But here is the ultimate bummer: Unlike the follicles on top of your head, human cochlear hair cells do not regenerate once they are destroyed. When a strand of hair falls from your scalp, another takes its place. When a cochlear hair cell dies, a patch of permanent silence moves in.
In my case, the hearing loss wasn't caused by blaring music. I was the unfortunate recipient of aggressive childhood medical treatments in the 1970s—a time when primitive radiation and heavy-duty clinical interventions were deployed with blunt force, effectively resolving the immediate crisis but taking plenty of healthy sensory tissue along with it. The unshielded, legacy technology of that era caused profound damage to my inner ear that grew more pronounced through the years.
At the time, the overarching concern of my doctors was simply ensuring survival and monitoring basic developmental milestones. They watched my height, my weight, and my chart like a hawk.
Nobody ever warned my parents to worry about my hearing as a long-term consequence of the treatments. Nobody predicted that a lifesaving intervention in elementary school could gradually silence the world by the time I reached middle age.
Despite remarkable technical advances, modern hearing aids still come with a catalog of daily annoyances. There are the unexpected “blessings” of ownership that the commercials never discuss, including regular earwax checks, the anxiety of nightly charging, the suddenly dropped Bluetooth signals, and the frustration of your smartphone app randomly deactivating your custom settings. And then, of course, there is the eye-watering financial cost.
Among all the people who delay the inevitable, there’s a desperate and rather self-deceptive strategy called "grin and bear it." Over time, we become remarkably deft at social pantomime: smiling at what feels like the right time, nodding along rhythmically.
Unbeknownst to the world, we perfect the art of looking intensely, profoundly engaged, leaning forward with an expression of deep understanding. “Oh yeah, makes total sense to me,” we’ll say smoothly, or, “I’m so happy you shared that,” having completely missed the entire premise of the conversation. It works beautifully until someone asks you a direct, open-ended question, and then the illusion instantly shatters.
People wait an average seven to 10 years from when they first suspect a hearing loss before they treat it, according to the Journal of the American Academy of Audiology. Being stubborn is apparently a core part of the medical diagnosis. Many start to notice hearing loss in their 50s and 60s, yet men make up a majority of the customer base. According to the CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, men between the ages of 45 and 84 use hearing aids roughly twice as much as women.
Vanity, of course, applies to everyone. Few people want to wear a placard that reads, “Speak up, I’m deaf.” We minimize our loss because we convince ourselves that most of what we’re missing isn't important anyway. We tell ourselves it doesn't matter whether Jerry ordered the haddock.
Why should we make a fuss, or ask for a quiet booth in the back of the restaurant, when the conversational volume will likely hit the stratosphere in an hour anyway? What? I’m sorry, what? It must be the acoustics in this room. What did you just say? Could you just point to it on the menu?
But left untreated, the consequences of this isolation are not funny. Those with untreated hearing loss don't just miss words; they experience profound mental fatigue from deciphering the missing pieces of broken sentences.
The exhausting part isn't simply the physical inability to hear. It's the constant, grinding friction of the “say again,” “what?,” and “I didn't catch that” loop. Every conversation becomes a reminder that your sensory deficit is now everyone else’s problem, too. Gradually, family and close friends begin to accept that talking to you requires extra effort, and your world grows smaller.
The irony is that checking one’s hearing requires little heavy lifting. It takes about 25 minutes to complete a standard hearing test. You step into a small, square, soundproof room with foam padding on the walls. You put on a pair of clunky headphones, and you simply raise your hand when you hear a beep, a tone, or any faint ripple in the silence.
In no small way, you have a chance to rejoin the living world, so don’t shy away from a little test, especially since there are no wrong answers.
We have a chance that generations before us never had: the technology to choose connection over silence. Hearing aids are not a confession of diminished capacity. They are imperfect devices that also help restore clarity, connection, and independence.
Using hearing aids can be an act of courage. We are given a brief window of opportunity to fix what is broken. We should take it.
Eric Steinert lives in Massachusetts.
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