Confession: I listen to podcasts at 1.5x speed.
It’s like watching a movie in fast-forward. Slight fast-forward. It’s not double the pace—it’s just halfway there. The effect is podcasters who sound peppy, caffeine-wired, and a little like Alvin and the Chipmunks. They also tend to speakinsuchawaythatalltheirwordlumptogether.
My wife razzes me about such silliness. But once you’ve grown accustomed to 1.5x, regular speech sounds sluggish. Tipsy.
Tipsy or not, this is artificial time travel. With the tap of a thumb, we warp to the moment those words were spoken, then listen while they’re spoken again at whatever pace we command.
Obviously, we don’t get that sort of control from everyday life. Boring or intolerable stretches seem to last a lifetime, while the better ones (vacations, for instance) zoom on by. It’s like someone’s cranking or slowing the speed on the pod, only it’s not us. Maybe it’s God. Does God like podcasts? Probably.
There must be mental tricks that alter time’s perception. I’m pretty sure that’s what mindfulness is all about, although I despise mindfulness because it’s a social media buzzword everyone uses, yet no one defines. Like “growth hacking.” Or worse, “gut.”
It’s a futile gesture anyway. Ask any parent about their child’s childhood, and they will, to a person, express the same thought: “It went by so fast.” If anyone says, “It was the slowest stretch of my life,” you must avoid them, because they’re an alien replicant. Reminiscence bolsters this phenomenon, too. High school dragged on while I was living it, yet now, it seems it vanished in the space between blinks, and so long ago.
And oh yeah, remember Covid? In my lifetime at least, there’s no distortion like it. Some days, even high school feels more recent than lockdowns and social distancing. Others, it feels like only a few months have passed since everything went back to more-or-less normal. Covid feels like its own little pocket in time—a separate feed, to further the podcast metaphor.
Of course, our understanding of time’s passage is entirely subjective, even though the recording is anything but. Every minute lasts sixty ticks of the hand, every hour sixty minutes. Yet when we live that hour, we’re living at different speeds.
So I suppose I’ll continue living at whatever speed life chooses. Unlike my podcasts, where I listen at 1.5x, sometimes even 2x if I’m feeling plucky, and I pile into the car with Sara, and my Magic: The Gathering pod starts auto-playing, and she mocks it by speaking in clipped jumbles of gibberish until I turn it off.
But hey, I chose that speed, just like I chose that podcast. Time, however, has different plans.
Kyle A. Massa is a comedy author of some sort living somewhere in upstate New York with his wife, their daughter, and three wild animals. His published works include 10 books, along with several short stories, essays, and poems. When he’s not writing, he enjoys reading, running, and drinking cheap coffee.
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