LOVE My Bose Quietcomfort2 earbuds. The active noise cancelling is one of the best in the industry. You can customize up to three modes with your own desired level of noise cancelling from totally silent, to completely transparent (to hear what others are saying). The app lets you chose between something like 10 different levels of noise cancelling.

In louder environments, you could turn down the transparency mode so you still hear “some” sounds, but not everything.

Then I simply turn on some quiet music to hear my own favorite tunes, and then shop around. This not only helps me block out other noises/sounds, but gives people the impression I can’t hear anything, so they don’t bother talking to me (thankfully) hahaha.

For me I use them while bicycling - full silent to jam out to my tunes in quiet neighborhoods, and then switch to transparent “aware” mode when crossing busy intersections.

Only complaint is the call quality - kinda sucks because the software is trying to noise-cancel my voice when talking to people, and they all say it sounds like I’m in a hallway or fishbowl. I wish there was a way to disable that feature or tweak it somehow. But that’s fine, I don’t use these for phone calls anyway, I use them for blocking out the world.