Thursday, October 1, 2026
There is an unwritten contract that comes with riding on the Long Island Rail Road. You buy your ticket, you find your seat and you agree — implicitly, silently, without anyone asking you to sign anything — to share a small, enclosed space with strangers for the duration of your journey. It’s not always comfortable. It’s rarely glamorous. But it works, because most people understand that shared spaces require a certain baseline of consideration for the people around you.
That contract is being violated, every day, by people who can’t be bothered to use headphones. This lack of common decency is getting worse. Perhaps it signals the erosion of pre-pandemic norms, or the proliferation of short-form video content that simply must be consumed the moment it appears. But the reason doesn’t matter. The result is the same: a train car held captive by one person’s indifference.
You know what I’m talking about. The commuter who has his phone propped against his coffee cup, watching a video at full volume like he’s in his living room — a living room, apparently, with very thick walls or no neighbors. The guy on his Bluetooth speaker. Yes, a Bluetooth. On a train. In public. Among other humans.
What is so urgent that it cannot wait — or at minimum, be routed through a pair of earbuds? If you’re going to subject your fellow passengers to unsolicited audio, the least you can do is make it enriching. Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” A Pulitzer Prize-winner on Audible. Perhaps a documentary about the migratory patterns of the Arctic tern. Something that, when the woman across the aisle glances up from her book, she might think, “Well, I didn’t ask for this, but I’ll learn something today.”
Instead, what Long Island commuters are treated to after a long day of work is a TikTok of someone attempting to fit way too many cherry tomatoes in their mouth. Or a Twitch stream of a man dropping words that would make a sailor take notes. Or, my personal favorite, a FaceTime call conducted at a volume that suggests the party on the other end is located not in Queens but in Uzbekistan.
The headphone — wireless, wired, over-ear, in-ear, take your pick — is sold at every price point from reasonable to why-does-this-cost-more-than-my-first-car, and is one of the great inventions of the modern age precisely because it solved this problem. It lets each of us live inside our own sonic world without inflicting it on everyone else. The technology is cheap, ubiquitous, and works perfectly well even when moving at 60 miles per hour.
And before anyone reaches for the ready-made excuse, “My AirPods died” is not quite the sympathetic defense it might seem. Yes, it’s mildly inconvenient to sit for 40 minutes without being able to catch up on the latest episode of “Love Is Blind.” We understand. We feel for you. But that inconvenience — yours, private, manageable — pales significantly when compared with forcing the occupants of an entire train car to listen to it with you.
Charge your headphones. Toss a wired pair in your bag. The bar here is low, but it’s still worth clearing.
Long Island commuters are not a fragile lot. Anyone who has navigated Penn Station at rush hour or waited half an hour for a delayed train on an unsheltered platform in January has developed a certain resilience. We don’t need silence. We don’t need perfection. Trains are noisy — the screech of the rails, the hiss of the doors, the conductor calling out “Jamaica next!” in a voice that carries to the next car. That’s the deal. That’s ambient. That’s fine.
What isn’t fine is being forced to listen to someone else’s choice of entertainment, which, based on available evidence, is made with absolutely no one else in mind.
So here’s a modest proposal: bring your headphones, and use them. The train is a community — a rolling slice of Long Island life, hurtling toward work or home. Communities are at their best when their members extend small courtesies to one another.
And, if you absolutely must share your audio with the world, at the very minimum, make it Bach.
