The feeling of listening to podcasts approximates the feeling of having original thoughts.
As you listen to interesting ideas, not only do you feel that you’re learning something, you even feel as if you’re coming up with new ideas. In a sense, you are; the podcast stimulates new idea-embryos every minute, but they’re aborted just as quickly—by the next interesting idea.
Once you put the podcast down, of course, you’ve forgotten everything and you certainly haven’t created or produced anything.
The seemingly edifying habit of podcast listening can, therefore, be harmful—especially for people who love ideas, for these are the people who should be producing ideas.
The degree of this social harm might pale in comparison to malaria or lead poisoning, but I suspect its much worse than people think, since I’ve never heard anyone talk about it. I wonder how many brilliant thinkers are not writing because they are addicted to listening.
Whereas an addiction to crappy television is self-limiting for high-status people, because it’s rightly stigmatized and associated with laziness and poverty, a podcast habit does not include this salutary feature. On the contrary, it’s plausible to tell oneself that one is learning and making intellectual progress when, in fact, one is completely outsourcing the task of thinking, in every free minute of one’s life.
Beware the podcast addiction. The simplest solution is to take written notes on any podcast you listen to, especially making sure to write down original ideas that come to you. If you follow through on this, you’ll quickly reduce your podcast listening, but get much more from it. You’ll also become more discerning about what you listen to. Â
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This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end, a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself… With tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex… Then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal… Do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?—This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!