Recently, I listened to three different podcasts while cleaning my apartment. One involved two women discussing a reality show I don’t watch. Another was about a political scandal in a country I don’t live in. The third may have been about running. Or divorce. Or both. By the time I had finished folding laundry and wiping down the kitchen counters, the details had disappeared entirely. The voices, however, remained.
For a long time, I assumed I listened to podcasts because I was interested in them. The same way I assumed I occasionally found myself watching ASMR because I was interested in whatever impossible task somebody was performing with a microphone and 12 glass bottles. Then I realised I could get through entire episodes and remember almost none of the information afterwards. That was when I started paying attention to when I reached for these things.
Once, while walking to buy toothpaste, I realised I had automatically opened Spotify despite the journey taking less than ten minutes. The silence between leaving my building and reaching the pharmacy apparently required immediate intervention. At some point, it occurred to me that I wasn’t really looking for content. I was looking for a person. Or, more accurately, I was looking for the feeling of a person without the demands of an actual one. Not conversation exactly. Just presence. Another voice nearby, one that did not need me to reply or participate.
This confused me because I spend quite a lot of time avoiding people. I regularly ignore texts for several hours. Group holidays make me feel tired before they’ve even begun. And yet, somewhere over the past year, another person’s voice became part of the architecture of my day. The more I thought about it, the less unusual it seemed. My mother keeps the television on whenever she’s home alone. “The house feels empty otherwise,” she says. Ruchi Sharma, an architect, falls asleep listening to the same three hosts, which feels strangely intimate given that they have never met. Most people, I realised, have their own version of this phantom company. When I spoke to Deepti Chandy, therapist and COO of Anna Chandy & Associates, she described the appeal as “a sense of companionship without the demands of active conversation.” Chandy argues that this desire exists against the backdrop of a culture that expects us to be permanently reachable. There is often “an unspoken expectation to remain available, responsive and engaged at all times,” she says.
Seen through that lens, podcasts, narrated essays and ASMR feel less like quirky listening habits and more like a reaction to communication fatigue itself. Somebody always wants a response, a reaction, confirmation that you’ve seen the thing they sent three hours ago. But a podcast never notices you’ve become distracted halfway through, a narrated essay doesn’t care whether you reply and nobody hosting an ASMR channel is waiting to hear your thoughts. The relationship remains comfortably one-sided.
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