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Notes -
I don't buy into the traffic part (though it might be more applicable in the US, where drivers are not trained or compelled to give cyclists proper room?), but mountain biking, sure. At that point you are doing a hazardous sport rather than utilitarian transportation; I'd accept the necessity for parachutes when high-altitude tightroping too, without being for making them mandatory while walking on firm ground.
I really don't want people who are wearing headphones on my piste (or, on that matter, on the road)...
I was actually convinced to try wearing a ski helmet once. It was not only uncomfortable, but also messed with my situational awareness (since it restricts wind flow around my face and heavily buffets my ears), though perhaps if you are the sort of person to want to wear bluetooth earbuds while skiing you don't particularly use that sense anyway.
Relevantly, perhaps, I don't see what gear there really is to hold down. I'd use a single heavy knit cap with lining, which holds itself in place just fine, and maybe add polarized sunshades if it's a sunny day. If I am going to engage in skiing where I expect head-down crashes of the type that would get snow on my neck, then sure, there is an argument for helmets, as there was for mountain biking - but again, we would be engaging in a strange conflation where we force the safety standards of an adjacent high-risk activity on a lower-risk one that doesn't need them, unnecessarily encumbering the lower-risk one in the process. Most biking does not involve uneven dirt paths that weave between trees, and most skiing does not involve doing 360-degree flips or unmaintained mountainsides.
(cf. Rust: Most programming does not involve people dying if a use-after-free happens!)
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