There are some things that I’ve never done in my life because the opportunity was never present for me, or it’s just something I never got around to, or it would require way too much planning for a lazy person like myself. There are other things I’ve never done because, at the end of the day, I knew the idea simply didn’t appeal to me.
Podcasts fall into the latter category. I get the appeal of podcasts, and the subject matter of podcasts in general are so innumerable and so varied that there’s gotta be a podcast out there for everyone. But for me personally, there’s only so much time in the day that I can have my headphones around my ears, so the competition of what I play on them is fierce, but 100 times out of 100, music wins.
I know that it’s comparing apples and oranges to say that "music is better than podcasts," but I love music so much that there really isn’t any time to listen to people talk. Podcasts lack appeal to me simply because music exists.
But I’m trying new shit this summer, of course, and I knew I was going to be hungover as fuck from a wedding the night before, and I needed something new and simple for a Sunday morning, so I put three new albums on my iPod classic, and also one podcast.
Is the concept of a "podcast" so ubiquitous yet that I need not explain what a podcast is? I dunno, I’m picturing my dad reading this blog post, and I can see quite clearly the slightly puzzled look on his face that he gets when millennial technological bullshit is discussed with him, so let’s spend a quick paragraph in explanation.
Podcasts are, generally, audio files that you put on your listening device, and mostly are people talking about certain subjects, or anything at all, really. Each podcast features multiple episodes that you can download. You can "subscribe" to a podcast, meaning that these episodes download automatically, or if your electronics are shit like mine, you can manually download individual episodes as well.
I don’t want to dive to deep into a critique of the specific podcast episode I listened to, because there’s no way that a single 30-minute episode of one Podcast could ever adequately serve as a stand-in for the podcast experience as a whole.
For what it’s worth, a friend recommended a podcast called Reply All, and episode 29, "The Takeover." Reply All is a podcast "about the Internet," and this specific episode was a short oral history of a teen in Australia that created a Facebook group that functioned as "office culture role play." The episode was interesting, and I chuckled a couple times.
Ultimately, though, it left me unfulfilled. Not due to the content—again, critiquing this particular episode would be pointless in this context—but due to the fact that I wasn’t listening to music.
It’s good to get new information and work that academic part of the brain. In learning about the exploits in the fictional offices of Stackswell and Co., I gained a tiny bit better understanding of how humans interact online. I received a modicum of knowledge.
But I listen to music for emotional release, and during most parts of my day, that’s a lot more valuable. When I was driving around Philly in my work van, a bit hungover, on a beautiful Sunday morning, I didn’t want to be strengthening my mind. I wanted my heart to do flips. I wanted to pump my fist and yell at the top of my lungs. Podcasts just didn’t do it for me.
Love,
Joey
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