Hearing aids, by the way, will also make a fashion statement of sorts. They will be sold in a dizzying variety of colors, designer brand and generic, endorsed by all manner of luminaries. Mark my words: Hearing aids may be as ubiquitous to the 40-somethings of the future as braces are to today's adolescents.

Scary, yes, but not improbable.

See, we're slowly surrendering our hearing to the cacophony of the modern world. Researchers are now saying that the growing popularity of portable music players and other gadgets that clip right onto our ears is speeding up hearing loss in younger people.

Hearing experts at Purdue University in Indiana have been checking students at random and finding an increase in what they call noise-induced hearing loss, which means these youngsters have lost the ability to hear higher frequencies or have trouble following conversations in a noisy room.

Specialists elsewhere confirm that they're seeing more people in their 30s and 40s with pronounced tinnitus, which causes ringing, whooshing or buzzing in the ears. Much too early for such an ailment, they add.

In other words, as an expert told the Associated Press, there are more and more "older ears on younger bodies," something that first started when the portable Walkman debuted a few years ago. For a society so in love with youth, for a country that spends millions of dollars on creams and surgery to subtract years, this should serve as a wake up call to turn down and tune out.

But it also should come as no surprise. Look around you. Stroll down your block. Ride on a public bus. People with wires hanging from their ears are everywhere. I joke with my children that headphones seem to be as stubbornly permanent as the clay spots I can't wash off their sports uniforms. They don't understand because they can't conceive of a world without them.

Where once such devices were relegated to appropriate times, now they've become necessities. The other day I watched a kid come off the school bus listening to music on his headphones, oblivious to the traffic zooming past him. And I can't even begin to count the times I've thought pet owners were talking to their dogs while taking them for a walk when, in reality, they were blabbing on their cell phones. "It's a different level of use than we've seen in the past," said Robert Novak, one of the Purdue researchers who spoke to the press. "It's becoming more of a full-day listening experience as opposed to just when you're jogging."

I fear that the words "Can you hear me now?" from the popular cell phone commercial will become the phrase that defines our times.

As a lover of silence — this a result of belonging to a large, noisy family — I fail to comprehend how there can be so much to listen to in the outside world. Internal music is often more melodious than anything coming from the radio. Yet, somehow we've become addicted to filling space with sound. We're not resting our ears. We're not letting them recover from the constant stimuli of a fast-forward world.

Perhaps one of the biggest challenges we face is to find a way to strike a balance between staying connected and becoming unplugged, between the calm of silence and the activity of words. Quiet can be its own therapy. Ask anyone who has ever created, ever discovered: Deep thoughts are invariably borne from the stillness around us

By Ana Veciana Suarez