A buddy had a girlfriend who had reduced hearing. I noticed that people would raise their voice and really dumb down when speaking to her, like they were talking to a senile elderly. It'd happen before she'd said a word, so they clearly saw the hearing aid and assumed.

She admitted she disliked wearing the hearing aids, due to such things. But the alternative was not following conversations, which meant she'd get excluded because she missed important information.

Gave me a whole new perspective on hearing loss.

Maybe it's because I have been wearing aids through all my life, but I see things this way. I don't care much what stigma wearing one carries, considering the alternative is being "that guy" who needs everything repeated twice, and that is a stigma I hate.

It does seem to depend on the hearing aids as to whether people can see them. I have NHS hearing aids - made by GN Resound, I think. I really like them, but as they use sound tubes rather than wires to a speaker in the ear canal (the oddly named "receiver in canal"), they are fairly low end. Ok, so that means I have small tubes snaking in to my ears. I still had to tell a cousin four times that yes, I was wearing hearing aids, and no, I hadn't forgotten them. In fact that was how I got my mother to get hearing aids - I told her I'd been wearing them for three years and she had not noticed.

As to being excluded: one of my jobs is funeral officiant. Several times I've found the spouse of the deceased being left out of the funeral conversation because of hearing and I've even been told not to bother talking to them because they won't hear. Every time I've found that we can talk perfectly well - it just needed a bit of effort on my part.

I don’t think the stigma is around hearing loss it’s about age.

And stigma is probably not the right word, it’s an internal acceptance issue.

You are right, I thought about it a bit more, and I think it was more vanity for me, since I was fairly young when the hearing loss started. But hearing aids nowadays are so inconspicuous that most people don't even notice them.

It almost certainly depends how social norms develop.

When Borg bluetooth earpieces first came out, they definitely carried a tech bro/fin bro/VC/etc. vibe that, at any moment, someone more important than you might want to get in touch with me.

I do think Airpods today carry a certain I'm not necessarily giving you my full attention vibe whereas an obvious hearing aid is a medical prosthetic. To the degree that Airpods replace hearing aids for some number of people or just assist people who aren't quite at the prescribed medical device level, that probably changes.

The one thing that I do believe Apple managed with the iPhone is the removal of this "tech bro" vibe from carrying a smartphone overall. So I guess it's not entirely out of the question that Apple will remove the stigma from wearing huge headsets 24h long...

I'm skeptical about big headsets but small earpieces seem headed towards becoming pretty normalized.

One of the other things that was happening at the time--though not disconnected--is that data charges were getting to the point where normies (or at least reasonably well-paid ones) could at least reasonably consider owning a phone with a data plan even if their company wasn't footing the bill. I bought a Treo a while before the iPhone came out and paid for it on my own after a foot injury that made it difficult to travel with a laptop.

> I don't think I've ever seen someone with a hearing aid and though anything negative of it, I get it people can be self-conscious, but for something like a hearing aid I think it's unjustified.

Neither have I. On the other hand, I have seen people wearing air pods and thought they looked ridiculous, as if they had qtips sticking out of their ears. Especially if they're sticking out at different angles.