I literally cannot understand the mentality of people who'd make fun of you for wearing hearing protection at gigs. I go to a lot of gigs (like multiple times a week) and "simply trusting" that the sound engineer won't push the volume up into hearing damage territory is... naive at best.

Please folks, use protection. I like Etymotic earplugs, but to be honest i'm not even sure if they're "heavy enough", but my pain threshold is pretty low i think. In any case since i've been consistently using ear protection i've almost never had the ringing thing after concerts, which makes me rather glad.