Doris Lessing hated recorded music. She feared it. She thought that music may addle individuals’s brains a lot that it might drive them to kill, to torture, to maim. “Is it doable—and I do know this mad speculation is asking for ridicule—that we’re poisoning ourselves with music?” she wrote, in 1994. Lessing acknowledged that making such a robust, intoxicating substance—one which shamans use to create magical moods, that generals use to encourage troopers to go to battle, that monks use to awaken their congregations to devotion—immediately obtainable to anybody and everybody needed to be, as a minimum, a really large deal in the midst of human historical past.
What would Lessing have product of the podcast revolution? We stroll round with plugs the scale of shelled peanuts in our ears, listening to the individuals we invite to reside inside our heads. The ability of the medium is immense. It was once that with a purpose to preach you wanted a pulpit or a TV or radio present, or no less than a soapbox. Now all you want is an Web connection—and, ideally, the help of one of many well-funded corporations which have sprung as much as develop the style, like Pineapple Road Media or Pushkin Industries, which was based, in 2018, by Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell. Only some years in the past, Alex Blumberg, a radio producer who was an everyday presence on “This American Life,” made a podcast, “StartUp,” whose first season adopted him as he tried to discovered his personal podcasting firm. In an early pitch to an investor, he was all however laughed out of the room. The present featured Blumberg’s agonized conversations along with his spouse about his resolution to doubtlessly flush their household’s monetary future down the drain. He’s presently sitting fairly because the C.E.O. of Gimlet Media, which he offered to Spotify, final yr, for 2 hundred and thirty million {dollars}. There’s a prospecting really feel to the podcast business, a rush to mine the gold of our thinly stretched consideration earlier than it runs out for good. Podcasts today are rife with brightly voiced advertisements for different podcasts. Anybody could be a podcaster: novelists, journalists, comedians, professors, actors, scientists, plus a pleasant smattering of conspiracy theorists and self-appointed demagogues. It’s like beginning a storage band, however with out the aspect of cool.
I’ve listened to podcasts for a variety of years, however I normally come again to the identical half-dozen. The hosts are my buddies now, although they don’t realize it, and occasionally I get sick of indulging their banter with out being requested what I believe. Within the hope of inviting some new individuals into my thoughts, I went searching for podcasts on a really podcast-y topic: happiness. Self-improvement is large within the podcast world, which is sensible for a medium that’s supremely conducive to telling different individuals what to suppose and do. There are well-being podcasts galore, however the ones that appeared most worthy of consideration for restricted listening time are hosted by psychologists and neuroscientists who’ve skilled buy on the topic.
Laurie Santos, the host of “The Happiness Lab,” which is produced by Pushkin, is an upbeat Yale psychologist whose course Psychology and the Good Life is the preferred class within the school’s three-hundred-year historical past. (When it was first supplied, in 2018, practically 1 / 4 of the college’s undergraduates enrolled.) One purpose for such reputation is clear: like the remainder of us, however extra so, undergrads are under-rested and overworked, and need assistance making their lives extra of a pleasure and fewer of a distress. One more reason turns into clear while you take heed to the podcast: the category is a intestine.
Santos began her podcast final yr; earlier than that, she taught comparable materials on Coursera. (A few of her college students’ mother and father could discover their happiness ranges dipping after they notice {that a} model of the instruction they’re paying for is extensively obtainable totally free.) In every phase, she employs the journal author’s time-honored technique of opening with a pointy, particular story that introduces the final theme. Within the present’s second season, which started in April, the Georgetown neuroscientist Abigail Marsh’s expertise of being rescued by a stranger from a near-death incident on a freeway results in an exploration of altruism and its inverse, psychopathy. An encounter with an exterminator evokes an examination of what makes a job worthwhile; a mom’s horrified realization that she has been gazing at her telephone quite than at her new child’s face raises the query of distraction, and learn how to keep away from it.
Alongside the way in which, we’re taught numerous happiness methods—higher to place your telephone away throughout dinner than to depart it mendacity face down on the desk, the place it could nonetheless tempt you with its siren name—and advised about research within the subject of hedonics, like one through which topics had been handed cash and advised to both hold it or give it away. (The givers turned out to be happier, on the finish of the day, than the keepers.) I’ve now heard this research referred to on different podcasts about happiness, with its outcomes invariably introduced as counterintuitive. Didn’t the Beatles determine you can’t purchase love? Latest episodes of “The Happiness Lab” function an advert for Chanel’s J12 watch, the worth of which may run as excessive as fifty thousand {dollars}. Should you’d wish to expertise true happiness, strive giving a type of away to me.
“The Science of Happiness” is hosted by Dacher Keltner, a psychologist who runs Berkeley’s Better Good Science Middle, which co-produces his podcast with PRX. The present, presently in its sixth season, is simple about its self-help proposition; episodes have alluring titles like “Do You Wish to Be Extra Affected person?” and “How one can Love Individuals You Don’t Like.” The reply, to those and different conundrums, appears to contain changing into extra conscious, which Keltner’s friends accomplish via a variety of meditation methods obtainable on the Better Good Site. Keltner’s present has a looser format than Santos’s primarily scripted one; he invitations topics to decide on a happiness apply, kibbitzes with them about their expertise of it for ten or fifteen minutes, after which does a skim of the science concerned.
The conversations go on slightly too lengthy, and also you get the sensation that these individuals—who’ve spent a couple of minutes of their day observing a tree, in an effort to loosen up sufficient to not kill their whiny youngsters—are being well mannered. In a single episode, the interviewee, the disabled violinist Gaelynn Lea, describes her misery at being put liable to contracting the coronavirus by individuals who refused to put on a masks. She tried a loving-kindness meditation that concerned wishing for the happiness of the individuals you like, and of these you actually don’t. Sooner or later, as she approached the second class, Mitch McConnell popped into her head, which needs to be sufficient to place anybody off loving-kindness meditations. I choose a method for dealing with the stress of “time famine” that was steered on “The Happiness Lab.” The visitor, Tom Hodgkinson, a author who in some way makes a residing by encouraging individuals to be extra idle, advised Santos to take away her earbuds infrequently. Hearken to the birds sing; take a nap. I adopted his recommendation, and didn’t remorse it.
