Earbuds in by default means the world has to knock twice. Some things won’t knock twice.

A small barrier filters more than you think. With something in both ears you are not unreachable, only slightly expensive to reach, and most approaches are not worth that cost to the other person. The ones that get lost are the single-attempt kind: somebody deciding whether to say the thing, a stranger asking a question, a friend who might have stopped.

Try leaving them out for one walk a day, or one stretch of a shift. You are not giving up music, you are making yourself cheap to reach for forty minutes. Most days nothing happens; the point is that on the day something does, you are there.