I have a confession to make, and I suspect some of you will recognize yourselves in it.
I have known for several years that I have meaningful hearing loss. My audiologist confirmed it. Bonnie has been gently reminding me for the better part of a year that I should do something about it. And about a year ago, I actually went to Costco and tried on a pair of hearing aids while I was shopping.
I lasted maybe twenty minutes. One of my ears started itching, and when I reached up to scratch it, I nearly shoved the device into my inner ear because I had forgotten it was there. The ambient noise in the store felt strange and unfamiliar. I didn’t have a real conversation with anyone to test them properly. And when I left without buying, I told myself — and anyone who asked — that I had tried them, and they hadn’t helped that much.
The honest version is simpler: I had made up my mind before I walked in.
The Story I’ve Been Telling Myself
Here’s how hearing loss works for me in practice. I hear most things. Not all things, but most. When Bonnie and I are talking at home, I catch enough of the conversation that I can follow along most of the time, and when I miss something, she repeats it without much fuss. She’s patient about it — more patient than I probably deserve — though she does occasionally mention, with the particular tone that married men will recognize, that hearing aids might be worth considering.
The harder moments come in noisier environments. Watching television at night, I’ve started using my Apple AirPods Pro, which help with the audio. In rooms full of people, with competing conversations and background noise, I miss more than I catch. And I’ll admit — and this is the part I’m not proud of — there have been occasions in those crowded settings where someone has said something to me in passing and I’ve nodded along with what I hoped was an appropriate expression, having understood almost none of it.
So far, as far as I know, that has never caused a real problem. It’s usually small talk. Nothing that gets missed badly enough to create an awkward moment.
But I notice it. And I notice that I’ve constructed a fairly elaborate set of justifications for why I haven’t done anything about it yet.
I’ve constructed a fairly elaborate set of justifications for why I haven’t done anything about it yet.
What the Research Says — and Why It Should Alarm Both of Us
Here is the part that has been harder for me to ignore, and I want to share it plainly because I think it changes the conversation.
Most men think of hearing loss the way I have been thinking of it: an inconvenience. A social friction. Something that makes the television louder and conversations slightly more effortful, but nothing that rises to the level of a health emergency.
The research says otherwise — and it says so with a forcefulness that I find genuinely difficult to dismiss.
Untreated age-related hearing loss, known clinically as presbycusis, is one of the most significant and underappreciated risk factors for cognitive decline in older adults. Johns Hopkins researchers tracking adults for nearly twelve years found that mild hearing loss doubled the risk of developing dementia, moderate loss tripled it, and severe impairment made it five times more likely. The likely mechanism isn’t complicated: when the brain is chronically working harder to process incomplete audio signals, it diverts cognitive resources away from memory and higher-order thinking. Over years and decades, that tax accumulates.
The social dimension compounds the biological one. Men with untreated hearing loss tend to withdraw from the situations where the loss is most noticeable — crowded rooms, group conversations, social gatherings — which leads to the isolation that independently accelerates cognitive decline. The hearing aid, in this framing, is not a vanity device or an admission of old age. It is, quite literally, a tool for keeping the brain alive and engaged.
According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, about one in three people between the ages of 65 and 74 has hearing loss, and men are nearly twice as likely as women to experience it. We are also significantly less likely to seek treatment.
The Costco Test I Failed
I want to return to that Costco visit for a moment, because I think it illustrates something worth naming.
When I put those hearing aids in and walked around the store, I was not giving them a fair trial. The acoustic environment was foreign and disorienting. There was no real conversation to test them against — just the ambient rumble of shopping carts and fluorescent lighting hum. And when one of my ears started itching and I nearly pushed the device into my own head trying to scratch it, I had my exit ramp.
What I did not do was sit with the discomfort long enough to find out what might be on the other side of it. I did not consult with a trained audiologist who could calibrate a device specifically to my frequency profile — high-frequency loss, as mine appears to be, responds differently than other types and requires proper fitting rather than an off-the-shelf trial in a warehouse. I did not give the technology a genuine chance.
I gave it twenty uncomfortable minutes and declared it insufficient.
I want to return to that Costco visit for a moment, because I think it illustrates something worth naming.
When I put those hearing aids in and walked around the store, I was not giving them a fair trial. The acoustic environment was foreign and disorienting. There was no real conversation to test them against — just the ambient rumble of shopping carts and fluorescent lighting hum. And when one of my ears started itching and I nearly pushed the device into my own head trying to scratch it, I had my exit ramp.
What I did not do was sit with the discomfort long enough to find out what might be on the other side of it. I did not consult with a trained audiologist who could calibrate a device specifically to my frequency profile — high-frequency loss, as mine appears to be, responds differently than other types and requires proper fitting rather than an off-the-shelf trial in a warehouse. I did not give the technology a genuine chance.
I gave it twenty uncomfortable minutes and declared it insufficient.
I am, in other words, doing exactly what the research says men our age do. We are 1.5 times more likely than women to avoid preventive care. Forty percent of men admit they would delay seeking care even when noticeably sick. We are experts at finding reasonable-sounding reasons to avoid information we suspect might require us to change.
I gave it twenty uncomfortable minutes and declared it insufficient.
Where I Actually Am — and Where This Is Going
I am not going to tell you that I’ve ordered hearing aids and everything is resolved, because that wouldn’t be true. I am still resistant. I still find the idea of wearing a device in my ear every day slightly more than I want to deal with right now.
But I am writing this article, which means I am at least willing to be honest about the resistance and examine what it’s actually costing me. It is costing Bonnie repeated conversations. It is costing me full participation in rooms where I’d otherwise be engaged. And if the research is right — and I have no good reason to believe it isn’t — it may be costing me something more significant over time, quietly, in ways I won’t be able to measure until later.
The technology has improved dramatically. Modern hearing aids are small, often nearly invisible, and can be calibrated precisely to an individual’s specific frequency loss profile. Many connect directly to smartphones. The Apple AirPods Pro I already use at night are, in a limited sense, a form of hearing assistance — which means I’ve already accepted the concept, just not the commitment.
Here is the statistic that has stayed with me most: only one out of five people who could benefit from a hearing aid actually wears one. That means eighty percent of us — men and women who have already been told they have meaningful hearing loss — are doing exactly what I’ve been doing. Constructing our justifications. Waiting for the right moment. Telling ourselves we hear most things.
If you are in a similar place — hearing most things but not all things, nodding along in crowded rooms, watching the television a little louder than you used to — I’d ask you to take the research more seriously than I have been taking it. Not because hearing aids are glamorous, or because admitting the loss is comfortable, but because the cost of doing nothing turns out to be considerably higher than most of us realize when we’re busy constructing our justifications.
I have an appointment to schedule. Maybe you do too.
