Doris Lessing hated recorded music. She feared it. She thought that music might addle people’s brains so much that it would drive them to kill, to torture, to maim. “Is it possible—and I know this mad hypothesis is asking for ridicule—that we are poisoning ourselves with music?” she wrote, in 1994. Lessing recognized that making such a powerful, intoxicating substance—one that shamans use to create magical moods, that generals use to inspire soldiers to go to war, that priests use to rouse their congregations to devotion—instantly available to anyone and everyone had to be, at the least, a very big deal in the course of human history.
What would Lessing have made of the podcast revolution? We walk around with plugs the size of shelled peanuts in our ears, listening to the people we invite to live inside our heads. The power of the medium is immense. It used to be that in order to preach you needed a pulpit or a TV or radio show, or at least a soapbox. Now all you need is an Internet connection—and, preferably, the support of one of the well-funded companies that have sprung up to develop the genre, like Pineapple Street Media or Pushkin Industries, which was founded, in 2018, by Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell. Only a few years ago, Alex Blumberg, a radio producer who was a regular presence on “This American Life,” made a podcast, “StartUp,” whose first season followed him as he tried to found his own podcasting company. In an early pitch to an investor, he was all but laughed out of the room. The show featured Blumberg’s agonized conversations with his wife about his decision to potentially flush their family’s financial future down the drain. He is currently sitting pretty as the C.E.O. of Gimlet Media, which he sold to Spotify, last year, for two hundred and thirty million dollars. There is a prospecting feel to the podcast industry, a rush to mine the gold of our thinly stretched attention before it runs out for good. Podcasts these days are rife with brightly voiced ads for other podcasts. Anyone can be a podcaster: novelists, journalists, comedians, professors, actors, scientists, plus a nice smattering of conspiracy theorists and self-appointed demagogues. It’s like starting a garage band, but without the element of cool.
I have listened to podcasts for a number of years, but I usually come back to the same half-dozen. The hosts are my friends now, though they don’t know it, and every so often I get sick of indulging their banter without being asked what I think. In the hope of inviting some new people into my mind, I went looking for podcasts on a very podcast-y subject: happiness. Self-improvement is big in the podcast world, which makes sense for a medium that is supremely conducive to telling other people what to think and do. There are well-being podcasts galore, but the ones that seemed most worthy of consideration for limited listening time are hosted by psychologists and neuroscientists who have professional purchase on the subject.
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 most popular class in the college’s three-hundred-year history. (When it was first offered, in 2018, nearly a quarter of the school’s undergraduates enrolled.) One reason for such popularity is obvious: like the rest of us, but more so, undergrads are under-rested and overworked, and need help making their lives more of a joy and less of a misery. Another reason becomes clear when you listen to the podcast: the class is a gut.
Santos started her podcast last year; before that, she taught similar material on Coursera. (Some of her students’ parents may find their happiness levels dipping when they realize that a version of the instruction they are paying for is widely available for free.) In each segment, she employs the magazine writer’s time-honored strategy of opening with a sharp, specific story that introduces the general theme. In the show’s second season, which began in April, the Georgetown neuroscientist Abigail Marsh’s experience of being rescued by a stranger from a near-death incident on a highway leads to an exploration of altruism and its inverse, psychopathy. An encounter with an exterminator inspires an examination of what makes a job worthwhile; a mother’s horrified realization that she has been gazing at her phone rather than at her newborn’s face raises the question of distraction, and how to avoid it.
Along the way, we are taught various happiness techniques—better to put your phone away during dinner than to leave it lying face down on the table, where it can still tempt you with its siren call—and told about studies in the field of hedonics, like one in which subjects were handed money and told to either keep it or give it away. (The givers turned out to be happier, at the end of the day, than the keepers.) I have now heard this study referred to on other podcasts about happiness, with its results invariably presented as counterintuitive. Didn’t the Beatles figure out that you can’t buy love? Recent episodes of “The Happiness Lab” feature an ad for Chanel’s J12 watch, the price of which can run as high as fifty thousand dollars. If you’d like to experience true happiness, try giving one of those away to me.
“The Science of Happiness” is hosted by Dacher Keltner, a psychologist who runs Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, which co-produces his podcast with PRX. The show, currently in its sixth season, is straightforward about its self-help proposition; episodes have alluring titles like “Do You Want to Be More Patient?” and “How to Love People You Don’t Like.” The answer, to these and other conundrums, seems to involve becoming more mindful, which Keltner’s guests accomplish through a range of meditation techniques available on the Greater Good Web site. Keltner’s show has a looser format than Santos’s mainly scripted one; he invites subjects to choose a happiness practice, kibbitzes with them about their experience of it for ten or fifteen minutes, and then does a skim of the science involved.
The conversations go on a little too long, and you get the feeling that these people—who have spent a few minutes of their day observing a tree, in an effort to relax enough not to kill their whiny children—are being polite. In one episode, the interviewee, the disabled violinist Gaelynn Lea, describes her distress at being put at risk of contracting the coronavirus by people who refused to wear a mask. She tried a loving-kindness meditation that involved wishing for the happiness of the people you love, and of those you really don’t. One day, as she approached the second category, Mitch McConnell popped into her head, which should be enough to put anyone off loving-kindness meditations. I prefer a strategy for coping with the stress of “time famine” that was suggested on “The Happiness Lab.” The guest, Tom Hodgkinson, a writer who somehow makes a living by encouraging people to be more idle, told Santos to remove her earbuds once in a while. Listen to the birds sing; take a nap. I followed his advice, and did not regret it.
Listeners seem to enjoy these podcasts. Their iTunes ratings are high. They have similar strong points; both hosts are accomplished and likable, and you tend to learn a little something, even if you already knew it. (You probably understood that too much of a good thing reduces your pleasure in it; now you can call that the “hedonic treadmill.”) And they have similar flaws. The main one, I’m sorry to say, is that they are boring. An oddity of the scientific approach to happiness is that it can seem, to the laypeople among us, to be reinventing a wheel that has been turned, for thousands of years, by the world’s great religions, philosophers, novelists, and poets. Santos recognizes this; the show is currently in a “mini-season” that deals with thinkers such as Aristotle, Plato, Epictetus, and the Buddha. (There is some kind of hello-fellow-kids pact among podcasters to use only the cheesiest contemporary jargon. Wisdom from the ancients translates, in Santos’s words, to “old-school tips”; the journalist Dan Harris, who hosts the podcast “Ten Percent Happier,” refers to Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths as a “listicle.”) In fact, Buddhism, with its acknowledgment of the reality of suffering, seems to be what is often missing from these podcasts’ evaluative, quantitative view of happiness. They could use a little sand in their oyster—an appreciation of life’s rougher qualities which brings its beauty into relief.
This is the point of the highly enjoyable first episode of the novelist Hari Kunzru’s new podcast, “Into the Zone,” which proposes, in the sweeping, vague language of podcast promotion, to be about “opposites.” The opposites, in this case, are the Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno, and Norman Vincent Peale, the “Power of Positive Thinking” guru. The theme that ties the two together is California, the positive-psychology capital of the world, where Adorno lived as an émigré during the Second World War. That this story has been told before doesn’t make it any less of a pleasure to hear Kunzru, together with a fellow-Brit, the writer Geoff Dyer, knock around Venice Beach, trying to understand how the sober, dialectically minded author of “Minima Moralia” (subtitle: “Reflections from Damaged Life”) could have taken such pleasure in being chauffeured around the West Coast by his wife, Gretel, in a Ford they called their “Little Aladdin.” Adorno, it turns out, was, like Lessing, suspicious of popular music. He considered it a tool of power—as Kunzru says, “something that lulled the listener, urging them to consume instead of provoking a genuine emotional or intellectual response.” We should be careful what we listen to, Adorno thought. He was right. ♦
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