Between two headphones

Listening to podcasts on the move.

Midjourney generation.

You hear soothing spouts of speech.

Dulcet tones of NPR hosts. Upspeak fry of millennial twang. The *ahems*, *ahs*, and agreeable grunts of spoken sociability.

Words flowing, literally streaming, into your ears.

You tap, you swipe, and you’re off. Headphones over cartilage, buds wedged into ear canals. Succumb to the experience of pure utterance.

This is the podcast, talk track of our times.

And here’s the alluring thing: you can bring it all with you. You can listen to podcasts while you walk, run, hike, or bike. Bopping along to flitting conversation. Narration floating in your mind like aural subtitles beneath your effort. Voices follow as you move along the road or trail or track.

Perhaps you’re a purist. Maybe you refuse to sully your exercise with music or discussion. Untethered, you stamp on the pedals or plod along in trainers. That’s fine. You do you.

I was like this once: always unencumbered by devices, free to ramble with only the company of the mind’s meandering soliloquy.

Disconnecting is important. You should do it. Go outside and touch grass. Let your brain, your poor, fractured, distracted brain, wander without input. It’s inundated with the discontents and buzzings of our fractious, hyperconnected society; so allow it some reprieve. Breaking from media, even for an hour, is good for the soul.

But.

Sometimes it’s not the worst thing to have some digital company. To stride along, listening to the urbane inquisitions of a Klein or a Gladwell. To pedal to the cadence of an effervescent news recap. To grin at a pithy political hot take. To ponder as you hike the cliffhanging ellipse of a crime podcast. Or, dare I say it, to grunt against the meaty maunderings of a Rogan or a Brand.

If you’re like me, your device usage increased during the pandemic.

Alone all day, isolated with your own mental monologue, echoing and amplifying concerns, anxieties, and doubts. You were locked down, life paused, and you were worried. Solitary you sat, the only stimulus the churning of your addled brain.

Small wonder that as we laced up our shoes or clipped into pedals, we also reached for our earbuds. “Another hour alone with this person?” you thought. “No. No, thank you very much.”

So you tap your apps and enter into Podcast Land. And it starts: the lo-fidelity intro tune, the calm greeting from the hosts, the cloying 30-second advert. And then, sweet release—the pleasant, soporific flow of banter. Phonic narcotic. Audile opiate.

Listening to NPR in an Hieronymus Bosch painting. Midjourney generation.

What a peculiar thing to move through the world with recorded conversation in our ears.

To stride alongside the palaver of the chattering class. We take it for granted, but there is something odd about thinking asynchronously with other people. There’s a bizarre untethering of time and space.

Last week, I went for a run and re-listened to a Reply All episode released just weeks before 2020’s Covid lockdowns. The episode, about a regional musical pop hit that seemingly vanished from culture, is considered one of the medium’s best.

Three years on, it lingers as a digital ghost. Reply All is no more, the podcast shut down in 2022 due to a workplace dispute. I jogged along, listening to these voices from the past. They were unaware and innocent to the terrors about to descend.

As I listened, I stepped over the pandemic’s lingering fallout.

Garbage is strewn along sidewalks below sleek new apartment complexes. I step out into the road to give an extra foot to one of the sprawling encampments that spill into the streets around our apartment. I step back onto the shoulder to dodge a Tesla ferrying some knowledge worker, skipping over human feces in the gutter.

The plague accelerated every social trend. But when you’ve a podcast in your ears, it’s all just furniture.

Listening to the conversation, you tune in and out: social barbarity mere scenery to be stepped around or over. Why reckon with the injustices of the world when you have noise-cancelling headphones and a Spotify Premium subscription?

Midjourney generation.

We don’t want to be like this. We want to engage, to be involved in our communities, to confront the higher challenges of our age. But everyday life is a burden and the humdrum of workaday tasks weigh upon us.

Maybe you’re like me. Maybe stupid, banal occurrences at work linger in your psyche for days. A blocked legal review, a product strategy gone wrong, a mediocre presentation gnaw and gnaw. Or maybe you misspoke to a friend, some potential offense or trivium that dwells gnomelike in your mind. It will insist on itself as you lay in bed in the morning and as you move through the hardscapes of modern life.

Stories, voices, conversation—they remain my drug of choice. Narrative and discussion, injected via ear canal, mainlined into my temporal lobe. Without it, I worry and I grind and I spin into cycles of anxiety and depression. I’ll ponder too deep, think too much, and whirl into gyres of darkness.

Sometimes it is a horror to be alone with oneself. And so we plug in and step out. The demons of our soul, quieted by that cocktail of adrenaline and cortisol, momentarily outspoken by the voices of strangers in our ears.

Thanks for reading.

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Weekly run

Breakfast Club meets every Thursday for an 8-mile run:

• When and Where: 6:30am at Lake Temescal in Oakland, CA

• Pace: ~7:00 to 7:40 pace with a few hundred feet of climbing

• More info on Strava

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Get a Breakfast Club hat and stickers. Available in our Swag Shop.

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Tweets of the week

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Parting thought

“I think at a certain stage it becomes less about skill and more about being open. To the world, to yourself, to other people. You know, most of the incredible things that I’ve eaten haven’t been because the skill level is exceptionally high or there’s loads of mad, fancy techniques. It’s because it’s been really inspired, you know?”

Episode 4, Season 2, The Bear