The Case for Pausing Podcasts and Stopping Spotify
Finding silence in a self-imposed sea of content
“We all need to just tune out and have the pint of ice cream and the binge watch from time to time, but what’s alarming is when it becomes the only way in which we unplug. I think because so many of us have so little free time that feels like the energy that we have, that’s the most that we can pull off in our free time— that really passive watching, not doing. But it’s a viscous cycle because you actually end up feeling more burnt out at the end of it.”
-Katrina Onstad
“So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.”
- Gilles Deleuze
I had a realization during COVID that I’m still digesting. Partway through “sheltering in place,” a phrase that simultaneously overstates the difficulty of binge drinking and playing Playstation indoors while criminally understating the emotional toll of that phase of my life, I realized that none of my waking hours were quiet. Like a film character who had no say in the editorial choices of the director, some form of dialogue, score, or narration accompanied nearly every second of my day.
I’d rise embarrassingly close to when my first meetings were and immediately turn on the news to listen to the latest pandemic or wildfire developments. We’d listen to this tolling bell of doom while eating breakfast. Then I’d be in and out of Zoom meetings, Alexis and I seesawing between the kitchen table and the bedroom, depending on whose work call took precedence. When I was not on a call, I’d be listening to video game and film scores while copywriting, hunched like a gargoyle on my couch. After work ended, we’d move our kitchen table to the side and attempt the home version of our Crossfit gym’s workout of the day. After showering while listening to the raps, rhymes, and historical hyperbole of the Hamilton soundtrack, I’d turn on a podcast like Pod Save America while chopping the requisite onions for dinner. We’d eat while tearing through one of our COVID shows: first Tiger King, then Breaking Bad, then Parks & Rec, then Mad Men. After dinner Alexis would request a “palate cleanse,” so in bed we’d watch several Youtube videos about the usual suspects: shark facts, video essays comprised of articulate explanations of why certain movies in fact sucked, and finally football highlights. She’d usually be drifting off partway through the juicy slow mo of an NFL Films deep dive into the Philly Special or the Miami Miracle. I’d then put in my headphones and finish the video by myself, usually polishing off one or two more afterwards. I’d end up going to sleep not because my brain actually wound down, but simply because my eyes could no longer keep up with the kaleidoscope of content swirling in front of me.
This hyper-saturation of entertainment, a brain blender full of music, podcasts, and videos reached a dizzying climax during COVID. However, it wasn’t new for me. I’d long been someone that watched TV while eating meals, read while having a snack, and listened to music or a podcast while biking or driving literally anywhere. At this point I’m a self-diagnosed content addict. Perhaps you can relate. Perhaps you find this insane and worrying. Both are valid reactions.
I first sensed this might be the case after graduating from college. During these tender years I secretly grappled with the kind of existential dread I only later learned was commonplace among my peers. This sense of doom was loudest whenever I had a moment of quiet. Given stillness or a moment for my mind to wander, it inevitably wandered to some anxious and sad places. I felt like a puppy who just keeps eating your trash or that nihilistic spork in Toy Story 4 who is convinced that he is trash. I found out that I could keep these feelings at bay as long as I stayed very busy and avoided silence like the plague. I needed other people’s voices to not be alone with my thoughts, which often felt scary and alienating.
Rediscovering podcasts, like Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, which my college roommate had introduced me to, was a boon to my sanity. I promptly binged every episode I could find. History podcasts were to me what true crime is to so many people. Listening to gruesome accounts of Eastern Front of World War Two and the conquests of the Mongols was somehow more calming for me than any narration my brain could conjure up. At night, I’d only be able to sleep if I had a TV show or movie I’d seen before playing. The familiar dialogue functioned as white noise, a millennial lullaby that my colicky inner child needed to be soothed to sleep.
While I eventually learned how to fall asleep without Netflix partway through my twenties, this lattice of interconnected forms of content was always nearby when I had strong emotions. When COVID hit, the unique stressors and claustrophobia drew my old habits out of remission, emerging from the depths of my spinal cord in the same insidious way that shingles does.
There’s an old Navy Seal adage that goes “Under pressure, you don’t rise to the occasion, you fall to your level of training.” During COVID I had to confront the fact that my base training was distraction. I was habituated to use entertainment to dissociate, using it as a balm for everything from anxiety & depression to boredom, overwhelm, and every other flavor of discomfort. When life pushed me, my main defense was to try to wall myself off with content and noise.
Like many habits adopted during COVID, it’s taken me a long time to understand this one and longer still to reverse it. When Alexis started business school in 2022, I confronted an opportunity to do just that. Since she was gone for 4 hours each Tuesday and Thursday night, I suddenly had a lot more free time to fill. At first, I did what I was in the habit of doing, filling it with more content in the form of video games and Youtube, only to find myself feeling empty at the end of my bountiful free time. You can only kill so many waves of Nazi Zombies on your Playstation before something inside of you dies along with them.
So I tried mixing it up and working on a hobby instead. While the days were sunny and long, I’d walk to my local park to practice my Spikeball serves and shots after work. This felt more productive than gaming for hours on end, and improved my Spikeball game over time. Still, I’d always have an earbud in and felt impatient and self-conscious most of the time.
On a whim, I tried not bringing my headphones to the park. How brave of me, right? It sounds silly and obvious to say it now, but a quiet hour by myself felt remarkable. Instead of splitting my attention between an activity and a podcast dissecting current events, the psychology of lying, or a film I’d already seen, my attention could finally be fully embodied in what I was doing.
I was immediately surprised by how soothing this felt. My mind began to wander once more in a pleasant way. No narration or music gave space for random thoughts to appear, bump into each other, and combine into new things. It wasn’t that I had no distractions; it was that I had the right kind of distractions. Suddenly I was noticing things in my surroundings and in my head that I hadn’t seen before. Watching my train of thought felt like watching a curious dog explore a new backyard. I felt a tender love for this being. I marveled at how many interesting and even funny ideas I had in just one hour of silence.
Ever since this epiphany in the park I’ve been exploring how I can reintroduce silence into my life. Here’s some of what I’ve learned about myself, silence, noise, and the mysterious intersections of all three along the way.
Too many external voices means my voice is drowned out
When I started going on walks, bike rides, and drives without a soundtrack, my mind began to chatter once more. Instead of constantly bathing in other peoples takes on the latest news, I was finally free to arrive at my own, or even think about something other than Will Smith slapping Chris Rock. What these thoughts conjured up often surprised me. I found myself recalling random memories, developing ideas for essays, and having delightful mini-epiphanies about my life. I doubt I would have made these connections with someone else’s voice narrating everything.
Having content always around increases my baseline overwhelm and anxiety
There’s a lot of great research out there that arrives at the conclusion that multi-tasking is a myth. When we multi-task our brains are actually just switching rapidly between inputs, like an over-caffeinated teenager browsing Tik Tok. Hence the somewhat ironic resurgence of books & podcasts about embracing “mono-tasking” once again. Defaulting to music or podcasts in most of my free time was forcing my brain to constantly multi-task. Ironically, on stressful days, my brain cognitively and emotionally interprets content as additional noise or stress, instead of the joyful distraction from my stress I hope it will be. Even if I’m not actively listening to something I still have to expend energy tuning it out. If I go on too long of a podcast bender while going about my apartment routine, I end up feeling unsettled, overcome with the cognitive equivalent of nausea.
Constantly listening to content makes any interruption become a distraction
Like many, I’ll use podcasts to make the mind-numbing amount of washing dishes and folding laundry that adult life entails a bit more palatable. However, if I’m listening to a good podcast, anytime Alexis calls from the other room or a friend texts me, this sudden interruption of my listening gets interpreted by my brain as a disruption or an annoyance instead of the warm or benign gesture it likely is. Because I’m occupied with the task of listening to Michael Barbaro spoon feed me the news, I feel overwhelmed when I must simultaneously digest Barbaro’s whatelseyouneedtonoddaday, keep tabs on the pasta on the stove, and now figure out what is being asked of me.
Too much content means too many decisions to overthink
Here are a few situations I find myself in surprisingly often. I’m curious if you can see yourself in any of these or if I’m just neurotic and weird:
I just heated up some food, returned home with takeout, or had a DoorDash order arrive. I find myself vibrating with frustration, despondent at feeling unable to choose what to watch while I eat. There are far too many options but my brain keeps coming up with reasons not to settle on one. It takes 10-20 minutes of cycling between Netflix, HBO and Youtube to finally pick something. My dinner is cold and I spend the meal overthinking if I would have enjoyed another show or movie more.
I’m going to make dinner so, I go to pick out a podcast to listen to while I cook. My favorite series of the moment hasn’t released a new episode this week, so I decide to browse my second and third tier options. There’s a current events update from The Daily that looks way too heavy for my mood, a Pop Culture Happy Hour episode about a TV series I haven’t seen yet, and a pop science show like Freakonomics Radio about a social phenomenon I already know a lot about. I consider listening to Planet Money’s latest joyride across the “are we in a recession” discussion, but I worry that’s going to make my mood enter a recession, so I decide to skip it for tonight. I realize I’ve been scowling at my phone for ten minutes and still haven’t started any podcasts or, more importantly, dinner.
I’ve got some downtime before bed so I decide to treat myself to a Youtube video or two. Finding something that’s the right length, tone, and topic for this sleepy time proves remarkably difficult. I find myself repeatedly yanking the refresh function at the top the feed with one finger, like a gambler hauling back the arm of a slot machine. Desperate for more dopamine, what I want feels simultaneously just around the corner and farther away than ever.
Whether this sounds incredibly silly or embarrassingly relatable to you, the takeaway is the same for me. Having some activities that I do without an external soundtrack removes several decisions from my day and lets me get on with whatever I’m trying to do. Sometimes I just need to make dinner and that’s okay.
Silence creates necessary, grounding contrast in my life
Wind occurs when there is a pressure or temperature differential between two chunks of air. It’s the contrast between weather systems that causes wind to blow. This is why shorelines, where the cold water meets a relatively warm landmass, are often incredibly windy in the late afternoon. Without this contrast, there is no wind.
Similarly, I believe ideas and inspiration flow when we expose ourselves to contrast. Our brains are most engaged and nourished when there is texture, structure, and depth in our environment. During COVID, I was confronted by the largely changeless environment of the interior of my apartment, compounded by the fact that I had a never-ending wall of information blasting into my ears and eyes. As a result, there was barely any contrast between the hours of my day or days of my week. The only difference between my work time and play time was which screen I was looking at and how the digital content on them differed. The result was stagnation and languishing, a self-imposed doldrums for my headspace. With the benefit of a few years of hindsight, I’m now adamant that our brains deserve so much more than this.
Adding intentional silence to my days meant adding breathing room and vital contrast along with it. Instead of having my free time blur into a seemingly endless to-do list of content to consume, crushing prestige TV and well-researched podcasts like they were one of my work Asana tasks, I started to have real breaks and buffer between parts of my day. This let my brain truly relax and reset between different types of activities. This beautiful shift started with things as simple as a quiet walk around the block, a bike ride to the gym without a podcast in one earbud, or reading a book instead of watching a video before bed.
Silence makes me more creative
I now firmly believe that quiet time is imperative for the calm and centered state that’s the foundation for creativity. The reason they’re called “shower thoughts” is that the shower is one of the last places people don’t actively have a TV or stereo going, unless you have a waterproof speaker or insist on having Lin Manuel Miranda serenade your lathering like I used to do. The reason so many break throughs and epiphanies happen in the shower, on a walk, or while doing something unrelated to the problem at hand is because this is when our subconscious can actually chew on the situation and arrive at new approaches and solutions. The flip side of this is the paradox of creativity. The surest way to prevent it from happening is to try really hard to force it. There are even a few pithy Don Draper aphorisms about this:
"Think about it deeply, then forget it, and an idea will jump up in your face."
“You came here because we do this better than you and part of that is letting our creatives be unproductive until they are.”
What Jon Hamm’s Don Draper is getting at is that, in my experience, if you force your brain to act like a computer, constantly absorbing and crunching new data inputs, the end result will be an overheated state that is defined by obligatory outputs, not novel thinking or creativity. You trade true productivity for superficial busyness.
In his masterpiece The Creative Act, Rick Rubin makes the case that any creative person must hone their “antennae.” He articulates that paying careful attention to your surroundings is essential to noticing things that other people might not and then drawing connections that they can’t. Silence and listening are the pre-requisite ingredients to a this kind of curious and observant headspace.
Creativity is all about translation. It’s bridging worlds and borrowing an insight or pattern from one discipline and bringing it to another. This most often occurs when looking at something familiar with new eyes or noticing something new in a familiar setting. Implicit in doing this is the calm, space, and curiosity that only silence can provide. Without it, our lives become a loud, undifferentiated mass of other peoples thoughts, words, and needs.
Silence is for me, content is for me, balance is for me
To embrace the contradiction patiently stalking me, this essay and especially this blog wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t prioritized silence, but even after spilling all this ink I’m probably one of the biggest boosters for the internet and content out there. This love bordering on obsession is exactly why I needed to put some structure and limits into place for myself. Indulging my love unchecked was making me feel hollow, rushed, and miserable.
This unexpected manifesto about silence is also not meant to be an assumption that your life is too loud or that you need to make the same changes I did. I wrote all this down first and foremost to document for myself that I am capable of losing my way and then finding it again. Exploring my relationship to silence taught me that many of my habits interlock in hidden and surprising ways. Changing any one causes delightful ripple effects that I’m still charting today. This reminded me of just how much agency I have over my headspace and mood.
However, if you saw or heard yourself in parts of my journey, I would enthusiastically encourage you to try a few silence experiments. Adding some pauses, rests, and buffers into your day can have delightful and unexpected outcomes. You’ll likely catch your breath and clearly see what your train of thought really sounds like. You might even nurture a new hobby or change your self talk for the better.
The most valuable and challenging part of adding more silence to my days was confronting the parts of me I’d been silencing with all the noise. Once I forced myself to fully listen, I realized that, in addition to a simmering sense of overwhelm stemming from sheer overstimulation, my lack of silence was getting to me for another, deeper reason. I was only consuming, never creating, living as a receptacle for other people’s content. At its most extreme, this felt like the internet using me as a breathing machine to exhale its thoughts into the world.
On the flip side, silent time is some of the only time that feels truly mine. It’s distinctly safe and separate from other peoples wants, needs, and the hot take industrial complex. While consuming content is passive, dependent on external forces, and subject to whatever is being fed to me on a given feed or platform, creativity is an independent act that I can control, strengthen, and practice at any time.
The irony of over-relying on one form of self soothing like music or podcasts is you often drown out other needs inside yourself that might actually make you happier if you let them. Constantly filling time and headspace with content made me feel placated but not truly satisfied. Only silence allowed me to be creative and it turned out creativity was what I was actually craving to be happy. Embracing the other side of a duality I’d long taken for granted flipped my world upside down in a good way. Just as the opposite of noise is quiet and the opposite of movement is stillness, I realized that the flip side of endless consumption was actually creativity. The real serendipity was realizing my proximity to what I really wanted all along. I didn’t have to move heaven and earth to find more creativity, agency, or joy in my life. They were there inside of me all along, patiently waiting for a quiet moment to come out and play.
This essay has been in the works for months. What did it bring up for you? What’s your relationship to silence and content like these days?
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Selected recommended reading if this post resonated with you:
“I think the internet wants to be my mind” essay from Evan Puschak’s excellent book of Essays called Escape into Meaning
“We Are Already Living in the Metaverse” by Megan Garber, March 2023 Issue of The Atlantic
The Creative Act by Rick Rubin
How to Do Nothing by Jenny O’Dell
4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
The Twelve Monotasks: Do One Thing at a Time to Do Everything Better by Thatcher Wine