I have a theory that about five billion people on the internet are having the same fifty conversations. Every few months, someone discovers one of these conversations, offers an opinion that has already been expressed by approximately twelve million people, and announces that they’re starting a podcast.
How many retired party girls do we need to become relationship gurus? How many men with microphones need to tell us that modern dating is doomed? How many episodes can we dedicate to whether men and women can be friends before we collectively decide that perhaps there are better things to discuss?
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy a good podcast. I love listening to interesting people talk about interesting things, and I’m certainly not suggesting that every conversation needs to be intellectually groundbreaking. Sometimes I want to laugh at something ridiculous while driving to the grocery store.
But at what point did having something to say become the same thing as having something worth listening to?
Another Hot Take, How Revolutionary
I think we’ve become a little too generous with the term “hot take.”
An opinion being unpopular doesn’t automatically make it insightful. Neither does being controversial, offensive, or delivered with an impressive amount of confidence. Sometimes your hot take is just a poorly developed thought that would’ve benefited from another fifteen minutes in your head.
Yet the internet has created an environment where having a reaction to something is practically indistinguishable from having an argument about it.
You don’t necessarily need research, experience, or even a particularly good understanding of the subject. You just need a microphone, a catchy clip, and a willingness to say something that will make the comments section angry.
And people will get angry. They’ll make response videos, send the clip to their friends, and spend the next three days explaining why someone with a ring light and a microphone is wrong about relationships.
Which brings me to another question: how much of podcast culture is actually sustained by people who enjoy the content?
I suspect a considerable amount of it is sustained by people who hate it.
There’s something fascinating about hate-watching. We claim to be exhausted by these conversations, yet we keep returning to them. We watch people whose opinions we don’t respect, engage with arguments we’ve already heard, and then complain that the internet has nothing new to offer.
At some point, aren’t we participating in the very thing we’re criticizing?
The Chicken Alfredo of it All
You know the ones.
Should men pay for every date? Is it disrespectful to like another woman’s Instagram pictures? Can you be friends with your ex? Is having an Android a red flag? Should a woman ever propose to a man?
I don’t think these are inherently terrible questions. In the right context, even a seemingly ridiculous question can lead to a worthwhile discussion.
My issue is that we’ve heard them all before.
And somehow, every person who gets behind a microphone seems convinced that their particular interpretation is going to change the conversation forever.
There’s only so much you can say about who should pay for dinner before you’re just rearranging the same three arguments.
What makes these conversations particularly exhausting is that they rarely evolve. They aren’t always attempts to understand why people think differently or how their experiences shape their values. Often, they’re opportunities to announce a position, defend it aggressively, and wait for someone to disagree.
I wonder whether we’ve confused disagreement with depth.
A conversation can be controversial without being meaningful. Something can be relatable without being particularly insightful. And having an unpopular opinion certainly doesn’t mean you’ve arrived at an original conclusion.
Sometimes the reason nobody agrees with you isn’t because you’re ahead of your time. It’s because what you’re saying doesn’t make much sense.
And that’s okay! We’re all entitled to a few poorly developed opinions. I just don’t know why they all need to be recorded.
What Happened to Memoirs?
I also find it interesting how quickly we’ve turned personal experiences into professional qualifications.
You spent your twenties partying, dating questionable men, and making a series of decisions you now regret. Congratulations on your growth! I’m genuinely happy for you.
But does that mean you need to spend the next five years teaching the rest of us how to live?
Somewhere along the way, we started treating surviving an experience as equivalent to understanding it. The person who had a bad relationship becomes a relationship expert. The person who made a lot of money becomes a financial philosopher. The person who went through a difficult period becomes qualified to explain the universal meaning of suffering.
There is absolutely value in learning from other people’s experiences. Some of the best advice I’ve received has come from people who simply lived differently than I did.
But experience doesn’t automatically produce wisdom, and telling your story isn’t the same thing as understanding what it means.
Which makes me wonder: what happened to memoirs?
I don’t mean that everyone should literally go write a book. I’m thinking more about the difference between documenting your life and reflecting on it.
A memoir asks someone to look backward, consider what happened, and decide what might be worth sharing. A podcast can invite that same reflection, but the expectation to produce new content every week doesn’t always leave much room for it.
Imagine trying to turn every significant experience you’ve ever had into fifty episodes of advice.
At what point do you stop sharing what you’ve learned and start searching your life for something you can sell?
Perhaps some experiences deserve time to become something more than content. Perhaps you can learn a lesson without immediately becoming responsible for teaching it to strangers.
And perhaps you don’t need to turn every phase of your life into a new professional identity.
The Business of Being Yourself
I think one of the strangest things about the internet is how we’ve managed to commercialize authenticity.
Everybody wants to be authentic. Everybody wants to be relatable. Everybody wants their audience to feel like they’re listening to a real person rather than a carefully constructed public personality.
But how authentic can you remain when your personality becomes the product?
If people love you because you’re brutally honest, do you eventually feel obligated to be brutally honest about everything? If they think you’re funny because you constantly make fun of yourself, do you begin exaggerating your shortcomings to keep them entertained?
I’ve been thinking about self-deprecating humor in particular.
I appreciate someone who doesn’t take themselves too seriously. The ability to recognize your own ridiculousness is charming, and sometimes making fun of yourself is simply funny.
But I wonder when self-deprecation stops being an honest reflection of how we see ourselves and starts becoming a way to sell ourselves short.
If your entire public identity revolves around being the girl who makes terrible decisions, are you allowed to grow out of that? If you’ve built an audience by being perpetually unlucky in love, what happens when you’re finally happy?
Do people still want to hear from you when you’re no longer playing the character they fell in love with?
There’s a strange contradiction in building a brand around being yourself. The more successful the brand becomes, the more pressure there may be to remain recognizable.
And I don’t think this problem is exclusive to podcasts. It’s part of a much larger internet culture that encourages us to turn everything about ourselves into something consumable.
Our hobbies become side hustles. Our relationships become content. Our personal growth becomes a series. Even our most embarrassing moments can become part of a carefully curated identity.
We talk constantly about being ourselves, but we’ve made being ourselves an exhausting amount of work.
Is Anybody Thinking for Themselves?
The most concerning part of all this isn’t that people keep making the same content. It’s that so many of us seem perfectly satisfied letting other people develop our opinions for us.
I love hearing different perspectives. In fact, I think seeking them out is one of the most important things we can do. Listening to people whose experiences differ from our own can challenge assumptions we didn’t even realize we were making.
But there’s a difference between listening to someone think and allowing them to do all your thinking.
Sometimes I wonder how many of our strongly held beliefs are actually conclusions we’ve reached ourselves.
How many are things we’ve repeated because someone said them in a particularly convincing way? How often do we mistake familiarity for truth because we’ve heard the same argument delivered by ten different people?
When an opinion becomes popular enough, it can start to feel like common sense, even when nobody has done much to examine it.
I think this is especially interesting when it comes to relationships, friendships, and the various rules people create for how we’re all supposed to live.
Someone tells you that a real friend would never do a certain thing, and suddenly you’re reevaluating a friendship that was perfectly healthy yesterday. Someone explains that a man who loves you would behave in one very specific way, and now you’re measuring your relationship against the expectations of a stranger who has never met either of you.
Advice can be useful. It can also be completely irrelevant to your circumstances.
You don’t have to agree with every interesting person you encounter. You don’t even have to decide whether you agree with them immediately.
Sometimes you can hear something, think about it, and move on.
Not every conversation needs to end with a conclusion.
Okay, Podcasts Are Actually Fine
The funny thing about writing an entire article titled Why You Don’t Need a Podcast is that I don’t actually think podcasts are bad.
Some of my favorite conversations happen when people with completely different backgrounds come together to discuss something neither of them fully understands. I love interviews that introduce me to people I otherwise wouldn’t encounter. I enjoy hearing someone explain a subject they’re genuinely passionate about, especially when their enthusiasm makes me curious about something I previously knew nothing about.
I also don’t think a conversation needs to be original to have value.
People have been discussing love, friendship, ambition, and happiness for thousands of years. I’d be pretty disappointed if we collectively decided that everything worth saying about those subjects had already been said.
The same question can produce entirely different conversations depending on who’s answering it, what they’ve experienced, and what they’re willing to reconsider.
Maybe that means creativity isn’t always about coming up with something nobody has ever thought of before.
Maybe it’s about approaching familiar things with genuine curiosity.
What bothers me isn’t that people keep discussing the same subjects. It’s that so many conversations seem designed to arrive at conclusions everyone already expects.
I don’t need every podcast host to be a genius. I don’t even need them to be particularly knowledgeable about everything they discuss.
I’d just like to hear people who are genuinely interested in discovering something, rather than people who seem primarily interested in being heard.
And I’d love for us to remember that being a good conversationalist doesn’t necessarily mean you need to become a professional one.
You can be hilarious at dinner without becoming a comedian. You can give wonderful relationship advice without creating a dating platform. You can have an interesting perspective on the world without making it your responsibility to explain that perspective to thousands of strangers.
In fact, I think some of the most interesting people are interesting precisely because they have lives that don’t revolve around being interesting to an audience.
So no, I don’t think you need a podcast.
Maybe you need a hobby. Maybe you need to read a memoir. Maybe you need a friend who’s willing to disagree with you. Maybe you need to develop an opinion without immediately checking whether the internet agrees.
Or maybe you just need to have a conversation that doesn’t end with someone saying, “We should start a podcast.”
Because sometimes a good conversation can just be a good conversation.
And sometimes that’s enough.
Leave a Reply