Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

The sound mixes today are so far off a pleasant experience that the people who do make them should feel ashamed - How do many actually have a home cinema room with soundproofing and 20 speakers ?

Most people watch movies with a headset / a TV / 2.1 / 5.1 surround system and they may even be limited by other factors like neighbours and you know real life..

And the the voice levels is obnoxiously low and way (negatively) beyond what i would call a good experience.

Aha! I have some answers here. Kind of, anyway.

This is something that people older than 20-something do, too, and have done their whole lives.

They're likely to do it if they grew up with the following often being true:

1) The TV is on.

2) At least some people are actually trying to watch it (it's not just "background noise")

3) The living space is fairly compact, such that if people are making noise in common areas there are no other common areas to escape to (not with a TV, anyway).

4) Bedrooms maybe don't have a TV or they aren't equipped with the same stuff as the "good" (living room, probably) TV.

5) House chaotic, lots of people around doing various things, many of these people (adults and kids alike) talking much louder than what some of us may be used to.

6) TV often in use in this same way during large gatherings (family and friends over, holidays, whatever)

In other words—drum roll—a Fussellian "Prole" (lower class) house.

But, why is this showing up in stats now? I suspect two causes:

1) "Prole" kids growing up and getting more streaming services than their parents had, plus using them more.

2) Anime has gone very, very mainstream among "the youths", so (as some others have noted) this may be expanding the set of people for whom captions seem normal beyond the ones I'm otherwise describing here.

Source: I know people for whom having the captioning on was normal when they were growing up, and they still do it because it's what they're used to, and I was in their houses when we were kids and saw why they gained that habit/preference. They're older than their 20s.

[EDIT] Others mentioned modern video sources coming with audio mixes that suck ass on most home entertainment systems—just flat-out incompatible with the reality of how most people watch TV/movies, where they want the highs (KABOOM! BLAM, BLAM!) to be much lower than the highs in a modern movie theater, plus are very likely watching on a crappy "sound bar", if not built-in stereo speakers. That could be a 3) on my list of causes, with 2 and 3 both being things other than the main phenomenon I'm describing int he rest of the post. This one would basically be the fault of movie and TV productions themselves, who aren't serving most home viewers well with the audio mixes they're providing.

You have the audio on and are doing something else with your eyes. You don't quite hear something that's been said, glance at the screen, read the captions to fill in what was missed, return your eyes to your other task.

If it was audio only, you missed whatever it was, and have to live with it or replay a little bit of content. Going back a few seconds is often a UI challenge not worth the gained context, IMHO, but if it happens a lot, might as well not be watching anything.