Who are these people who keep complaining about this supposed isolation and such? It's a complaint that periodically makes it on to Hacker News, but the more I think about it the more I feel like we're listening to a complaint made by a vanishing fraction of the population and giving them a more credence then they deserve because a few of them write with great pathos and drama.
But I'm old enough to have ridden the bus not just before AirPods but before really practical and widespread headphones in general. (Headphones have been available for a long time, but people did not routinely carry them around because they did not generally fit conveniently in a normal-sized pocket.) I've spent probably hundreds of hours on busses, much of that on a college campus where we were probably about as similar a social situation as we can be.
And busses were never rolling conversation hubs. They weren't tomb-silent but the conversations were almost always between parties who clearly knew each other. They weren't some sort of daily forum for the debate of politics, nor a reliable source of small talk.
The only one that I will agree is something I used to do was small talk with the checkout clerk, because the transaction takes long enough to be socially awkward to be standing in silence, but again, inconsequential small talk.
Every time I read one of these articles moaning about how we're all behind headphones and how impersonal the shopping experience has become, I become more convinced we're not listening to Important Social Commentary by Thoughtful Individuals... I think we're reading articles from that tiny minority of super-socially-aggressive people who used to incessently bother those around them with their overly intrusive attempts to converse with us in that distant past pissing and moaning about the fact that we now have the social ability to block them in a way that doesn't exceed our politeness threshold. The people that we've all met that we wish would just shut up, where we're sending them social signals and body language to please stop, and they just continue on.
Now this is what they write in response to that.
Now, I'll cop to being reasonably on the end of the "let me get in and out and accomplish my goal without your contribution", but I've spent plenty of time in contexts where I got to see other people in those contexts, especially as a child, and I just don't recognize the wonderland of social interaction these people seem to be missing out on. There was never a time where these random encounters (ignoring cases where you run into people you already know) were ever anything more than the briefest, most transient touch of humanity, and if someone is in a situation where they are starved for that, perhaps their problems are deeper and lie elsewhere and the solutions are something other than trying to convince everyone else to change for them.