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Fellow older men of this Sub, What advice do you want to give to the younger guys?(r/AskMen)
Not who you asked the question to, but I’ll chime in anyway.
If you expose yourself to enough loud sounds, eventually one of two things is going to happen: you will lose your hearing (either quickly or slowly), or you will develop tinnitus. Here’s a bunch of great examples of what tinnitus can sound like: www.hearing.nihr.ac.uk/public/auditory-examples-so…
Personally, in my early days in university, I was constantly exposing my ears to hugely unsafe volumes, either through listening to music in my headphones or by going to concerts with unprotected ears. Decent earplugs are cheap as hell and custom-moulded “musician” plugs aren’t terribly expensive either, especially if you go to a lot of concerts.
I DJ pretty regularly and go to a fair number of concerts, so for me hearing protection is a major concern. That being said, I can tell that I’ve done major damage to my hearing because I’ve pretty much always got a ringing sound in my ears that for sometimes no reason at all becomes very loud for a few minutes.
So, protect your ears. It’s easy to do and doesn’t take much money.