Listening can be Lonely: What do you do after listening to a podcast?
It’s been a few weeks since I came across this article from Vox, What podcasts do to our brains, which talked about how giving up podcasts changed someone’s life. It’s behind a paywall, so let’s talk about it.
“It was my first time hearing crickets in my new neighborhood because it was one of the first time I’d walked through it without AirPods jammed into my ears.”
It was a record scratch moment for me. Am I doing something wrong? I listened to over 20,000 minutes of podcast audio alone this year. 50,000 minutes of my life I spent with music. While I’m aware that there is a level of “coping mechanism” with this, I feel almost called out.
“Soon, all of my quiet moments were filled with other people’s voices, and I felt like I couldn’t think my own thoughts, even when I sat in silence.”
This gave me pause. I sit in silence a lot, actually. I do think my own thoughts, almost to the point where I feel insane. I love listening to birdsong, I never listen to a podcast on a hike, and overall I don’t try to fit every quiet moment of my life with audio. Just many.
“…by turning off one relentless stream of stimulus, I was freeing up bandwidth in my brain. By not listening to other people’s stories, I could better narrate my own.”
I think there’s something here, for me at least. I listen to a lot of podcasts, but I don’t watch much television - I’ll probably watch Heated Rivalry next summer, because I have yet to finish either of the Wicked movies. I read a lot, but sometimes I just can’t manage all of the information that’s coming in - and I take a break. From everything.
Usually these breaks come in the form of silent car rides, doom scrolling, or being in bed by 9:00pm. There’s a tension here on the other side. I created this job for myself, and it’s not something I ever feel caught up on. When I return from my break - whether it be for an hour or six-to-eight, I’m behind. I’m always behind in the first place because I listen to podcasts at 1.0 speed. I’m never going to “catch up”.
I’ve struggled with this, quite a lot. I see friends barreling through podcasts, books, tv shows and more. I feel left out. There’s this unintentional external pressure that has me crawling up a wall. Yet, I have to be honest with myself. I already prioritize podcasts over other types of mediums, but do I prioritize podcasts over birdsong?
Which is somewhat of a point. I like the time I spend with audio. I pair listening with different activities, and different types of podcasts with different types of activities, so that I can stop and focus on the audio. I nearly drove off the road once because of Dolly Parton’s America. I take better care while driving now. So yeah, this Vox article is more about how we can’t multitask. You can’t do two cognitive tasks at once. There’s a cognitive competition we’re not discussing enough between people, and maybe ourselves. We can discuss that at a later date. I feel like there’s something else humming under this idea of multitasking.
If you’re curious about what I’ve written about podcast and activity matching, read these!
Keelin
Keelin
To me, this whole question of “What podcasts do to your brain?” isn't the important question here. If every available moment of this writer’s life was once full of a podcast, then tell me, were they not extremely lonely? Sure, we can’t actually multitask, but what is life like where every spare moment you had - you spent it with a podcast in your ears?
If someone is listening to podcasts to take out the trash, to walk their dog every day, to wash dishes at every moment - I feel like we’re actually talking about loneliness. We’re never going to get a society to not multitask. We used to sing songs and process wool along with it, and tell stories as we did our mending, or shucked corn, or during whatever boring, tedious job we had to do. Humans have multitasked for a long time. I think this is the first time, though, that these activities are this disconnected from a direct, human exchange.
What I mean is, letters and text don’t have the person in front of you to speak - there’s a deeper disconnect than the person not being there to exchange the information. With podcasts, or anything recorded, we get this mismatch of human presence. We fill our ears with human voices, then take our earbuds out to an empty room.
Listening to a podcast is a solo activity. There’s a parasocial thing there, but even when I listen to a podcast with someone, like in the car or pressing play at the same time as we start a walk - it’s a parallel activity. We are not invited into each other's experience. Depending on who you’re listening with, it’s not going to be a start and stop, pause and discuss activity.
The only place where this parallel activity scenario becomes more of a community scenario is in live theatre, movies in theatres, and other in-person events. I’m even hesitant to describe movies in this, but the fact is that there is a different experience when you’re all watching a movie together that no one has seen before. There’s an energy that passes through the audience. Unlike live theatre and music, where the energy is passed between the artist and the audience.
If being a podcast listener is solo, what do we do with that when we’re also using it as a band-aid for loneliness? When it comes to filling every moment with “too many podcasts”. I really want to ask - what did you do with the podcasts you listened to? Did you listen to them, check some type of box that said “I did it” and then move onto the next one? I know I have a different role in the world of podcasting, but rarely a day goes by where I don’t tell someone about something I heard in a podcast. Either because it’s relevant to a conversation, or relevant to our relationship, or just something I think is so cool and interesting that I just must share it with someone.
I write this because What podcasts do to our brains has its point with multitasking and being present, but it doesn’t dig into how we got here, and what the reason for this obsessive listening is. Is it this need to be superior to others, by seeming to make ourselves better through whatever we decide to listen to? Or are we six years out of pandemic lockdowns, and using audio in our ears to cope with the fact we can't figure out what we want our relationships to look like?
My New Year’s resolution is to talk to more people about podcasts. This really is just my never-ending goal. I’m working on ways to do it, but this is a great time to remind everyone that this whole idea already exists - and it’s growing. Podcast Brunch Club is gaining more chapters by the month, Radio Ambulente has Listening Clubs. More and more people are looking to connect, and one way to do it is by talking about podcasts. It's taking the next step.
It’s hard, and I’ve missed my chapter meeting for the last five months because I’ve been sick or it just hasn’t worked out. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t options for this to happen on Discord servers, your local library, or even a FaceTime get together.
We don’t have to do this perfectly and we don’t have to do this in a way that’s pretty. We can stop using podcasts as the bandaid for loneliness, and make them the inception point of connection. A well-told story is universal, isn’t it? So let’s talk about how great these stories are, with each other.
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