Listen — Blog — Healy Chen

To the music

Every year I compile a top 10 list of songs that was significant to me for that particular year. I’ve done so since 2011, and it’s quite interesting to look back at these lists and see what songs are on there. The music provides a symbolic window into what sort of year I’ve had, and what kind of feelings I was contemplating throughout. Similar to the 365 challenge that I’ve also been doing since 2011, it’s great fun to look back at the times gone by, which is precisely why I do this record keeping, if you will.

A few days ago I took a look at the song list from 2019, and I was surprised to find that even though the songs were important enough to make the top 10 list, the amount of times I actually listened to each track were vanishingly little - one of the songs a mere 15 times! This made me realize how drastically I’ve decreased in music listening; the top 10 lists of earlier years featured songs I’ve played hundreds of times, so it was shocking to find one that made a list with a play count in the teens.

For a guy that used to relish listening to music on the bus to and from school, oh how the times have changed indeed. Surely the available explosion of podcasts in recent years have absolutely obliterated opportunities for music listening. I’m big on always striving to learn new things, so podcasts have dominated my casual hours; why waste the precious minutes on repeating tracks when there’s so much to learn from many interesting people and subjects.

I don’t exactly regret listening to podcasts: some of my mental health breakthroughs in regards to dealing with anxiety is owed to information gleamed from them. That said, in this time of continued sheltering at home and running out of proper things to do, I shall endeavor to indulge in music far more often than I’ve had in the past years. In the moments where I’m searching for stuff to do to pass the time, why not put on the set of Bose noise cancelling headphones and press play on iTunes.

It sure beats looking at the horror show on twitter for the umpteenth time.

The point of podcasts

A few weeks ago, there was a bit of a disaster in regards to the podcast app on my phone. It seems I’ve lined up so many shows to the queue that the memory load completely overwhelmed the system, and the app refused to function correctly. Every time I scrolled to the list of saved podcasts, the app would crash. At first unwilling to accept the reality, I did everything I could to resuscitate the app, including multiple trials of restarts. However, it was not meant to be, and the only method to get podcasts functioning again was to delete and re-download it from the app store.

My preciously curated queue of podcasts was wiped clean.

I could’ve painstakingly put the list back together once again, but the lazy part of my being compelled me otherwise. The rationale is that ever since I started listening to podcasts during my commute, the upcoming list have been growing and growing, with no end in sight; what’s the use of constructing it again only to potentially lose it once more? Some of the scheduled shows have been on the queue for the better part of a year, so purging it wasn’t really that big of a lost, other than the mental blow to my obsessive compulsive tendencies.

The problem with online content is that there’s so much of it, the well goes forever down into an endless hole. Each week brings in new stuff, and like a dog chasing its tail, you simply can’t hope to consume it all. This is true no matter the medium, be it podcasts, videos on Youtube, streaming television, or even physical books (I’ve made a pact with myself to not buy another book until I’ve read every single one that’s currently on the shelves.) It’s easy to fall into the trap of attempting to consume everything, which explains how my podcasts list got to be long enough to crash the app.

And also why I listen to podcasts at faster than normal speed (usually at 1.5x.) The point became to devour as much shows as possible, rather than listening closely and maybe learn a thing or two.

The unfortunate circumstance with the podcast app crashing presented the perfect opportunity to start over, to remind myself what the point of podcasts is. These days I’ve returned to listening at normal speeds, and only putting a few shows on queue to avoid having to take out the phone to select a new one when an episode ends.

Making haste slowly.