On Being Human
Ten years ago, if you would have told me that two people sitting in a room and talking to each other without an agenda would be the most popular form of content consumption then I would have laughed at your face. But here we are when it comes to podcasting.
I think like most of us, I struggled at the start by looking at the hour counter on a youtube video of the Tim Ferris Show and told myself “how am I going to listen for this long?”, only to slowly build up a huge appetite for it.
Sometime in 2022, I was consuming everything that Derek Sivers was putting out in his short podcasts and in 2023 I discovered The Seen and The Unseen by Amit Varma, which totally changed the game for me. Amit’s average episode is 4 hours and it goes upto 8 sometimes. This is my favourite podcast. He often mentions in his show that people put the mask down after an hour or two and then the conversation keeps becoming more and more natural. Regular listeners of the show swear by Amit’s art of holding a conversation and asking the right questions.
When you listen to something like this passively via your headphones, slowly you start building up the speed. I did not believe this because 6 months ago, 1.5x speed sounded way too fast for my brain to make any sense and now, 2x is my default. An 8 hour episode is 4 hours for me and similarly a 350 page book which is usually 4 hours of Audiobook has become 2 hour for me. This means that my speed of listening to a book versus reading a book is 2x which also means, there have been days this past few weeks (with the blessing of deactivating all my instagram accounts) that I have read more than 3 books in a week.
The other day, I found an audiobook on youtube of “No Longer Human” by Osamu Dazai and was really intrigued to see the comments. Most of them said to not read it if you are going through depression and also that this was a heartbreaking book. Now, for the most part, I enjoy reading books full of hope and wonder and beauty of things but I still went into it.
The book truly showed the darkness of being human and a very opaque existence. The comments were right. If I read this 3 years ago, I would have not been able to finish it. It shows the disintegration of a man who is not struggling in his depressive state. He is somewhat embracing it. The fact that it was sort of the author’s biography made it even more intense. Truth be told, the writing was brilliant but I hardly noticed it after a point because of the contents of the book. I will not recommend it if you are going through a remotely difficult time.
When it comes to where we are now, I have been noticing a change taking place over the past two years. I do not believe that it is a niche to embrace the old technology or way of living, it is slowly becoming more and more mainstream. There has been a massive increase of people who are going back to living more non algorithmically. Be it in the content they consume or the way they listen to music or watch movies. iPods are back in 2024 and they are getting better thanks to the mods.
Each new Substack post here is a more private invitation of interaction than any app with 24 hour timed stories. These email notifications excite me the way it used to when many years ago, I would have post notifications on. The interaction is more engaging because there is a pause between the instantness of things. When you sit down to write to me and click on the reply button, all you see if a space that is shared between you and me and nothing else.
The days of our lives have meaning and there is an audience for every single one of us for the stories we share. We sit down to listen to these podcasts because it is a reminder that people sharing what they passionate about without selling us something or wanting to get more views or likes makes us feel a bit more human and connected to each other in the age of AI writing poetry and making music while I prepare to get to work this monday morning. I think this is my way of taking it back and having some more sense of control.
till next time,
tijbed.