Against dystopian views of high-speed audiobook listening

The sound and the worry

There was recently a thread on r/slatestarcodex about “What life hacks are actually life changing”. One of the examples given was:

Buy audiobooks to read much more books, listen at 1.5-2x speed

This led to the following thread (later removed):

Aaa: A midwit in making

Bbb: Audio books help people consume many more books than they otherwise would, and listening to them in place of podcasts on commutes or during the types of workouts where listening is feasible is generally a good thing. Though there are certainly some fun podcasts.

Ccc: But you retain far less information. So it’s just so your mind is busy with something and doesn’t have to deal with existential crisis

I find this delightful.

You think you’re giving out helpful tips for internet friends? Haha, no, you’re inviting a review of your intelligence and philosophical outlook! It’s like a cute little bunny prancing through the forest until a piano suddenly falls from the sky.

Of course, “person on internet is mean” isn’t much of a story. (Ask me about my emails after I suggested that maybe Julian Assange isn’t the most admirable human being ever.) And anyway, everyone was fine other than Aaa.

No, what makes this funny is that there was a chorus of people agreeing with Ccc.

I too must admit Ccc has a point. Certainly, it’s human nature to do things that make us feel better. And for many of us, that includes doing things to prevent experiencing existential crises.

But try the following statements:

1. “Getting good sleep and regular exercise just means that your mind is full of happy chemicals and doesn’t have to deal with existential crisis.”

2. “Having kids just means that your mind is busy taking care of new life and experiencing ‘joy’ and doesn’t have to deal with existential crisis.”

3. “Hiking up to mountain vistas just means your mind is distracted by beauty and doesn’t have to deal with existential crisis.”

4. “Having deep relationships just satisfies ancient instincts designed to help you access resources and trigger a feeling of ‘meaning’ in your mind so it doesn’t have to deal with existential crisis.”

If angst is bad, then isn’t it doing things that reduce angst good?

I think most people believe that. As evidence, I’ll point to a weird norm our culture has that most people don’t seem to notice. You’re not supposed to talk about existential crises. Personally, I think my baseline instinctual angstiness would place me somewhere near the 90th percentile of the population. (I mean, I have a blog…) But don’t whine about it because I don’t want to be a lame edgelord.

It’s acceptable to refer to angst, but with remove. You can make dark jokes or create existential art. You can recite that “most men live lives of quiet desperation”. You can go on the internet and make clinical comments about other people’s angst. But you aren’t supposed to tell your friends that you’re currently having an existential crisis, please help. That crosses a line.

Of course, “edgelords are lame” is a modern norm. But I doubt proto-edgelording would have gotten you much further centuries in the past. People would probably have told you to go to church, or told you to take care of your family, or just avoided you.

I bring this up because I think the “edgelords are lame” norm is… good? Baseline angst notwithstanding, my life is quite good and would not be improved at all by more contact with people moaning about their feel-feels. (See that? See how I use humor and derision to demonstrate distance?)

In fact, why don’t we invert Ccc’s implied criticism? Why don’t we take, “prevent your mind from dealing with existential crisis” as a basic life strategy?

This would indicate lots of “healthy” stuff. (Travel! Friends! Romance! Hobbies! Meaningful work! Children!) But perhaps it would also indicate “wireheading”—shortcutting your brain’s reward architecture to feel good when you aren’t “supposed” to.

If you’re not familiar with wireheading, the classic thought experiment goes like this:

There’s a machine. If you go into the machine, electrodes will be connected to your brain, your memories of the machine will be erased, and you’ll live the rest of your life in a simulation of all your dreams and fantasies. Do you enter the machine?

(So, pretty much exactly the plot of Total Recall? Yes, Total Recall is a meditation on wireheading.)

Philosophically speaking, I find wireheading troubling. But practically, in the particular case we’re examining here, we can just consider a simpler question.

Is listening to books on tape at 1.5x-2x speed a form of wireheading?

And if so, what about music? What about jokes? What about comfortable furniture or attractive wallpaper?

People don’t have existential peace because they’ve figured out the meaning of life. They have existential peace because that’s their nature or because they’ve developed happy lives and healthy thought patterns that don’t lead to them spending their time moping around. Feeling like you understand the meaning of life is downstream of existential peace, not upstream.

So even though I think Ccc is right, in a deeper sense I think Ccc is totally wrong. Don’t put existential crises on a pedestal! Arguably they’re just a weird glitch in the human brain anyway. There’s no “correct” way to look at all this stuff. So if you like listening to audiobooks at 1.5x to 2x speed, listen away.

Like many people, I used to have trouble sleeping. I did all the standard things—I reduced alcohol, I kept the room cold and dark, I stopped drinking 17 cups of coffee every day, everything. And all that stuff helped. (If you have trouble sleeping, do the standard things.) But I wasn’t satisfied, so I tried various supplements. All of these were either ineffective, or left me groggy the next day. Finally, I discovered that what really worked was to skip all the supplements, and just listen to a podcast that was both very good and also very boring. The best podcast for this purpose turns out to be…

---

P.S. Today’s link is to Comedy Theory:

When you see a pattern (“A, B, C”), your brain automatically recognizes the pattern (“Alphabet”), and makes a prediction about what comes next.

Jokes have two parts, setup and punchline. Setup leads people to recognize a pattern, which their brains automatically use to make predictions and assumptions. Punchline forces their brain to switch to a different pattern, shattering their assumptions, making it clear that predictions they’ve made are invalid.