The Death of Listening
Somewhere in the past decade or two—pick your own cultural ruin-marker— it stopped being a side quirk that people don't listen and became a full-blown civic emergency, an extinction-level collapse of attention, curiosity, and the basic mammalian ability to register, or have any interest, whatsoever, in another person's interior life.
What's so insane about this is that it's happening at a time when listening should be the one thing we're accidentally great at. All of us. Think about it. We mainline audio all day. Podcasts, TikToks, Reels, Stories, "clips," YouTube videos, YouTube breakdowns of other YouTubes, explainer videos, unboxing videos. If you judged humanity by the sheer volume of noise we consume, you'd think we were monks of the auditory temple.
But no. The ears are doing their biological thing. The minds behind them, they're out back smoking a jay, posting an X, gooning, or fragging human-looking avatars.
Somewhere between the sixth algorithmic outrage of the morning and the ninth “you’ll-never-believe-this” clip of the afternoon, people forgot how to do the slow, unprofitable work of letting someone else’s words actually hit their bloodstream—the kind of listening I’ve been writing about for years. The kind that’s now nearly extinct, replaced nearly in toto by something weird and jittery and defensive. This newer, stranger listening doesn’t absorb anything. It waits, all wound-up and restless, for the tiniest gap in the conversation so it can jump back in, pre-drafts rebuttals inside their skull while the other person’s mouth is still making shapes, treating even basic conversation like a hostage negotiation with its own ego.
The wholesale dismantling of human focus, leaving nearly everyone highly distracted most of the time—that I get. Given all the tech we’ve been force-fed for years, the math mathes. And once you’re that distracted, not listening isn’t much of a leap at all. It’s the next automatic step, the little tap on that first domino.
But where it really breaks down for me is the jump after that. Many, if not most, people have gone from wholesale distracted (check) ➔ wholesale not listening (check) ➔ feeling retail compelled to actively advertise that they're not listening nor do they have any interest in even pretending to do so (jeez Louise). People, I've noticed, get some kind of strange, almost unconscious pleasure from broadcasting their disinterest in whatever others are saying. You can see this for yourself in real time. Watch closely. First, you'll see their eyes glaze over, then twitch while firing off tiny micro-saccades, and then, you'll see their pupils running little diagnostic routines: Does this person matter? How can this person help me? How fast can I bail?
This has become so common you can literally see the moment when they decide the other person is irrelevant. It's like someone pulled the emergency brake inside their skull and all the lights went out.
The craziest thing, the part that drives me apoplectic, and yes, I know I've said this a hundred times, is that this breakdown in human contact, connection, basic communication is not a glitch. This is the system performing exactly as it was designed.
Why? Because a population that listens is dangerous. And a population that is not plugged in, not hardcore addicted to screens, and that really listens is really dangerous. People who really listen have friends. They build trust. They build alliances. They form communities IRL where their lives are not monetizable in the convenient, surveillance-based way that makes the oligarch tech lords harden with joy.
A population that listens falls in love, gets attached, has friends, has sex, lives actual lives in actual reality. A population that listens is much harder to market to. They tend to go off-script. They're often disobedient. A car full of people laughing and screaming the lyrics to ‘Mr. Brightside’ at the top of their lungs isn’t paying attention to the billboards they’re flying past because they’re too lost in the moment, in each other. And these types, they don't bring in anywhere near the amount of dough that dopamine-addicted bettors, gamers, and gooners do.
Lonely people do. Exhausted people do. Twitchy, dopamine-starved people rotating between twelve tabs and five games and three screens—they do. They're perfect. They're the target. They just sit there. Tapping. Scrolling. Clicking. All day. All night. Drifting in and out of the kind of desperation where you can sell them anything from fake supplements and manufactured outrage to silicon girlfriends and new enemies cooked up in an offshore content mill.
Most importantly, they spend money without thinking that much about it. First they spend what they have. Then they spend what they don’t have. Then they go hunting for credit. And when there’s nothing left, the predators with their friendly little BNPL buttons step in. A purposely misnamed, sadistically usurious industry built to skin alive those who are already bleeding out. Patriotism at its finest.
Corporate America figured out long ago that a guy in 1994, driving around with four friends, high on gas-station sugar, shitty weed, and endless possibility, is worth exactly zero dollars. But that same young man today, atomized and alone, doomscrolling until 2 a.m. on a phone that sees inside his skull? That dude is a gold mine.
Which brings me back to listening.
I don't know the exact moment this train of ours called humanity derailed and started to conflate listening with merely hearing someone's words but it happened. Technically, it's true, but that's only the kindergarten version of listening.
The high school and college versions aren't much harder. They simply ask you to hold yourself still long enough for the other person's meaning to leave their mouth and arrive in your brain unedited. Not what you assume they said. Not what you pre-decided they were going to say. Not what you wish they said. What they actually said. Simple, yeah?
Then there’s the adult version, the graduate seminar, where you actually listen to someone you disagree with—oh my, the treachery, the horror—letting them finish what they're trying to say without preloading your rebuttal. And almost no one pulls this off.
Most of us don’t even make it that far. We don't even try. We shut down. We judge. We retreat to our safe corner, our familiar lane, and call it principle. We assume that anyone living in a different reality than ours must be flawed or broken or dangerous. And once that reflex kicks in, the conversation is over before it begins.
I fell for this a lot as a kid. If something gave me feelings or made me feel afraid or strayed too far off my little map of the world, I ignored it, judged it, or dismissed it outright. In junior high a friend tried to introduce me to Black Sabbath. Absolutely not. Isn’t that the guy who ate a bat's head on stage? Aren’t those guys into devil shit? Thanks bro, I’m good. That heavy shit was too ALT for me. So yes, I’m the one asshole who didn’t spend a single minute of my early music-loving years jamming to Ozzy (RIP legend). Big miss there. I did the same with CSN (RIP David Crosby, legend). They were “too druggy, too wayward” for my sheltered suburban brain. Another huge miss. That one, at least, I quickly redeemed in college. But to think I came this close to a life with no “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” is hard to imagine.
Years later, after high school, I finally realized the truth. The problem was me. My closed-off, fear-based way of moving through the world kept me sealed off from ideas, from people, and from subcultures that made me uncomfortable. I’ve been the exact opposite ever since. Anytime I feel that old reflex, I move instantly toward whatever set it off. I dig. I read. I ask questions. If I don’t know about something, or don’t agree with it, or don’t understand it, that’s exactly why I want to learn more. I want to know why that idea or those people or that thing is interesting to other people. And I want to know why.
Somewhere along the way that instinct to choose curiosity over fear and move toward the things I naturally avoided became a way of listening, too. It had to. You simply cannot get to understanding without it.
With this in mind, I decided to run some experiments—actual real-life experiments in close listening. This part feels a little disingenuous because I'm a genuinely good listener. I’m genuinely curious and genuinely interested in other people, and close listening has always come easy to me. Ironically, this is exactly why the over-the-top, almost radical shift in other people's un-listening ways was so obvious to me. People talk, I listened. I talked, they weren’t listening back. Not really. Not anymore. I first noticed this in drips. Then in a slow, steady stream. And then one day, seemingly out of nowhere, it hit like a firehose: that listening thing humans do, yeah, no one does that anymore.
So back to the experiment. Over the last few weeks, whenever I found myself in a legit conversation with someone, be they strangers, friends, family, whoever, my plan was to pay very close attention to what happened when I listened with real interest, and what happened when I didn’t. PS: For the record, purposely not listening to another human being was very uncomfortable for me.
The difference, I can report, was disturbing.
When I purposely didn't listen—whether I drifted off, checked out, or was purposely and performatively dismissive—the other person didn't appear to even notice. These days, apparently, not listening to others ➕ them not listening back to us 🟰 “it's all good.” This creeped me out. And, it broke my little heart.
However, when I did the opposite—when I leaned in, listened closely and carefully, with real interest and real curiosity—something unexpected happened: the world got more complicated, not less. Wow. I have to say, I’d never fully clocked that one before.
But why, I wondered? Why would listening closely and curiously create more complexity, while doing the opposite—actively not listening to them—make things feel easier? It's something I hadn't ever realized before but if you think about for a minute, the question answers itself.
When you listen closely to another person, when you really dial into them and whatever they're saying, you get dragged into their world. Their real world. And real worlds aren't simple. They’re layered and messy and full of contradictory motives and half-finished stories. and when you listen to them, you inherit some of that complexity. When you don’t, you get to ignore it or erase it or forget it. You get a cardboard cutout you can judge from a distance. Of course that feels easier. But it’s fake. And less interesting. And completely full of shit.
Ah. So if real listening forces us to absorb complexity—if it makes us sit with someone else's mess and history and contradictions—then not listening to them naturally gives us the opposite: It flattens everything out. We get more certainty, less nuance, and zero burden of compassion. Not listening, it turns out, is a cheat code for a simpler world. For a world with little to none of the most important kind of friction. And across twenty-six conversations I had, half of which I listened in a deep and fully engaged way, and half of which I pretended to not listen at all, this held. Square peg, square hole, every single time.
There’s more. These days the most thrilling part of two people actually talking and listening to one another—something a huge percentage of us seem to have forgotten how to do—is that it feels like touching a vanished world. For most of human history, a conversation was, by default, an encounter. Two people in a room, or on a walk, or at a table, trading not-quite-finished thoughts and seeing what happened next. Then, somewhere in our drift into tech-enabled modernity, something shifted. More and more of what we call “conversation” turned into performance—two separate monologues taking turns, each person managing how they look rather than saying what they mean. On those rare occasions when our conversations slip back into actual encounters, you know it instantly. You can feel it. Something real comes into the room. These encounters—these personal exchanges and entanglements that once held so much of ordinary life together—are now nearly extinct. How very sad for us all.
No bs. We're so far down the no-one-listens-to-anyone-anymore road that listening, as a shared human skill, discipline, craft, what have you, may actually be unsalvageable. At the very least, so far as I can tell, actual close listening—attentive, curious listening, the kind we owe our elders, teachers, bosses, and most definately, our friends and family members—has become so rare that when it happens, it looks like a radical, even revolutionary, act.
Personally, I think this is a good thing. A necessary thing. Because real revolutionary action—not violence, not rage-click theatrics, not division, but the active refusal to surrender and the active commitment to change—is the only antidote for the purposely calculated, deceptively ruinous capitulation we're all taking part in right now. It's cynicism and who cares all the way down. They somehow got us to work against ourselves. For our sake, and for the sake of our children's futures, we need to reclaim our humanity and fight for the revitalization of the human soul. And in a complex world of ever-expanding soul-level priorities, listening is way up there at the top of the list.
The math on this is simple: when listening dies, relationships die. And when relationships die, the death of civilization isn’t far behind.
Stakes Is High. If we don’t start listening to one another again—slowly, intentionally, awkwardly, with a feigned interest even when we have none—then we don’t stand a chance in hell.
Our culture—cooked.
My generation and yours—cooked.
All of us, trying to stay human in a world that would much prefer we didn't—yeah, cooked.