I always listen to music whenever I am, when I am taking a bath, walking, before and after the classes, or before going to bed. The moment I enter my room, I switch to the speaker. I listen when I’m biking, reading, and almost every moment of the day, except when I’m asleep or cooking in the shared kitchen. I love house, Ragaee, jazz, fusion, dub, and band music. Yet most of the time, I prefer instrumental tracks, since music without lyrics helps me concentrate on my reading.
Recently, I realized two things about my relationship with media, especially with my headphones and phone. The first is that I had been unconsciously using them to escape from my own thoughts. The moment I put on my headphones and turn on music, it doesn’t simply mean entering the rhythm; it also means shutting out the voices within my mind. It is, in a sense, an act of evasion, a way of distancing myself from reality.
At the same time, I’ve come to think that listening to the world itself is equally important to the subtle interactions between people, communities, movements, climates, buildings, and everything around us. Cultivating sensitivity to how we feel and think during these interactions helps us to maintain our psychological balance.
We instinctively drift toward comfort and familiarity, and perhaps this tendency, this instinct for ease is one of the essential skills for living in society.
Music, after all, possesses an undeniable power over human beings.
Thinking about this week’s topic, games, I realized that I play them a couple of times a year, usually when I want to escape from reality. Life can be overwhelming, and sometimes we crave another dimension of sensation, even if it’s just the repetitive rhythm of tapping a screen to reach a higher score.
To be honest, I used to look down on people who seemed addicted to games. Yet, occasionally, I play Call of Duty (COD), a first-person shooter military game. It might sound violent or grotesque, but in the game, I can earn points by playing and exchange them for new weapons or items.
I can get some items for shooting when I store the points by playing.
Interestingly, the game’s music plays a crucial role. It encourages players to move faster, shoot harder, and keep going. My favorite item is the Goliath, an Operator from the Rogue Black Ops faction. Every time I use the Golioath, the same Heavy and Death Metal track explodes in my ears. To unlock the Goliath, I must score enough kills, so the music becomes both a reward and a motivator. Once it begins, I transform. I become the machine itself, losing all sense of self in the rhythm of destruction.
Addiction is one of the most prominent social issues of our time. Parents can no longer prevent children from becoming absorbed in games or digital media. Yet, dependence itself is not inherently bad. We are all dependent on something. The real problem lies in exclusive dependence, when one relies solely on a single source of comfort or stimulation.
It is very easy to say that we should belong to multiple communities or maintain diverse emotional anchors. But in practice, balancing several social worlds and entering new ones is deeply tiring. It is an emotional and sensory overload that challenges even the strongest among us.
Perhaps that is why I wore my headphones the whole day. It is not merely to escape, but to create a small, controllable world of sound where I can breathe and, for a moment, listen to myself again.
Heavy/Death Metal track:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjOmwkBHT0g&list=RDTjOmwkBHT0g&start_radio=1
Recent Comments