OK, I will apologize here, sincerely. I suppose I am a perfect example for this thread of someone who let my initial reaction take over too quickly without checking the assumption.
To explain, I live in a place where, for whatever reason, I do not notice people face-timing on their phones (I do see constant texting) or being expecially loud on phones (ironically, I do hear volume pretty well; it’s that I have profound high-frequency loss which shows up in lost consonant sounds, so everything might be somewhat loud but like a blur (imagine a colorful, yet fuzzy impressionist painting as a visual parellel). When I put on speaker phone I still put it up to my ear to get the best chance of hearing those consonants and distinguishing syllables when it mostly sounds like vowels. I never face-time so I forget that people do, and so I imagined the only reason a person would use speaker would be to ramp up the sound (unless they were wanting to talk in the phone while doing housework or some other work with the phone set down). I guess I am feeling especially sensitive about the hearing issue right now in particular because I am thinking of quitting a couple of large-group things I belong to that are important to me but I just can’t consistently understand the presentations (even with microphone when people mumble) or social get-together talk or participate fully in meetings . I’m exhausted of trying. I do enjoy spontaneous conversations with neighbors and the occasional get-togethers with a few friends but this is a quiet community of tight-knit groups of locals and not much social mobility. I guess it’s getting to me a little. The frustrating thing for me is that I do understand well enough to be an almost “normal” conversationalist when people speak in a normal but clear way in a not too noisy setting (and I’m not talking about the super-exaggerated enunciating or shouting you do for extremely elderly people). However, I know that people don’t easily change their speech patterns. We prize independence and self-sufficiency in our culture but hearing loss really does make one’s participation in life depend so much on what others are, or not willing to “extra” for you and it can be humiliating and maddening to constantly feel you must ask for favors about an issue that otherwise has no fix except to BE alone. This is not meant to be a public pity party but an acknowledgement that I goofed …and what was behind it.
Maybe the larger story is that we just have a lot of disconnection and lonliness in our culture (even when appearances lead us to believe that people have plenty of connections in their lives. Maybe a lot of the rudeness we see is really the leaking of the frustrations worry, fear,grief, lack of trust and genuine isolation many of us are feeling even with lots of activity and people around us. People have always had difficulties of all kinds but maybe they at least had more feeling of belonging within small groups of people in the same situation.