I love listening to podcasts as much as I love reading articles. Some people have told me that they don’t feel the same way- they can read faster than a podcast and the whole speed-up-the-cast-to-listen-faster thing just feels weird to them. That has always rubbed me the wrong way. It is as if they are implying that listening to podcasts in real-time is somehow a waste of precious moments, and unless you are consuming an article or cast as fast as possible you are somehow violating a holy precept of time-optimization.
I love listening to Changelog podcasts, especially Spotlight and JS Party. I’ve never been much of a podcast kinda guy before, but once I heard Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo talk to developers at conferences (Spotlight) and have fun discourses on podcasts like JS Party, I really got into listening to podcasts and appreciating the personal touch they bring. I’m listening to humans talking like humans rather than a piece of text that has been perfected over many revisions. Don’t get me wrong: I love reading stuff, and the written word will always be my favorite means of consuming stories.
But podcasts have their own undeniable charm.
Here’s what’s hypocritical of me: I only ever listen to podcasts when I’m travelling.
You see, when I’m travelling, I can’t do much else. I can’t work or read anything; looking at a screen while in a moving vehicle makes me feel pukish. I get motion sick very easily. So it’s either listen to music or listen to a podcast. I used to do the former for a long time before I decided to give Spotlight a try (I can’t recall why) and ended up falling in love with it.
I’d been to a really fun event here in Mumbai called Tabletop Board Gaming (my first such adventure), and on my way back I was listening to Adam and Jerod introducing Rachel White as a panelist and wondering why I don’t listen to these podcasts more often. And I realized that I’d been as much of an obsessive optimizer of my time as the people who didn’t listen to podcasts (why bother when you can just read the transcript five times faster, right?). I listened to podcasts only when travelling because it’s the one time I couldn’t do anything else.
It’s the same with music. I only listen to music when at work, writing code, or at home, working on something. I don’t listen to music just to listen to music.
In the last three years, somewhere along the road, I forgot how to enjoy something for itself.
I forgot how to enjoy music for its own sake; how to listen to a podcast because I enjoy it rather than because I couldn’t do anything else.
My thoughts even turned towards taking long cab rides every weekend so that I could listen to podcasts without feeling guilty about wasting time and it was at that point that I just stopped myself and thought, “What the fuck?! Why can’t I just do the same thing sitting at home? Why must I force myself to go on a cab ride and deprive myself the possibility of being able to do other things just so I could listen to podcasts: an activity that I enjoy!”
The whole thing sounded so ridiculous in my head that it forced me to stop and really think about what I was doing with my time. They say time and tide wait for no man but do I really wanna be optimizing every minute of my day to the point where if I’m not multi-tasking, I’m not living?
I don’t know if this is a product of the kind of a hyper-performance oriented culture the modern tech industry propagates or if it’s just my own screwed up little mind, but this idiotic condition is my reality.
And I need to find way to go back to a time when I could just sit quietly and listen to music and not feel like I was wasting precious time: time that I could have used to advance my career, or be smarter, or whatever the hell people chase these days.
