The fuck it is lol - almost everyone I know, who works for a large corporation in a major metropolitan area is being forced back into a hybrid role. I went from completely wfh in March of 2020 to 4 days in office since the beginning of the year (NYC). I feel like there’s a sunk cost fallacy going on with the long 20-30 year leases a lot of these companies signed for in the 2010s

Hey there! Here’s a quick rundown:

IEMs - stands for in ear monitors, typically these are not used for casual listening to music, they are meant as a replacement or augmentation to the traditional monitor wedges seen at the bottom front of a stage during live performances. They are typically wired headphones, plugged into a wireless receiver that a front of house or monitor mixing engineer can feed individual mixes to the different members of a band on stage (drummer may just want to hear a click track, singer might want to hear themselves, etc.) they aren’t the best sounding, unless you spend a ton of money, but they do usually have some level of noise dampening in them so that you can hear what you are doing on stage better than through a monitor wedge.

Headphones - pretty typical catchall term for speakers on your head - they range wildly in sound quality and use case, and as a casual listener you’d be much better suited to find a pair of headphones to use, rather than IEMs. Most manufacturers will have some kind of breakdown on their product pages for what their headphones are best suited for (casual listening/mixing/noise cancellation etc.)

Earphones - I have to admit I’m not super familiar with this term, though I’d imagine when it’s used, it’s being used to describe headphones that prioritize calling someone on a phone, rather than a music based application

I hope this helps!