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
I also rely on music to give me peace of mind in stressful moments. And I usually play games during vacation or when I need a break from my other (mostly non-digital media) hobbies and can really get caught up in the games I play. With this I also notice a distance from the rest of the world, but this can get so far that I find it difficult to re-enter, so to say, the communicaties again. Thankfully this doesn’t happen very often and is very minimal.
I would have liked to read a bit more on how you think addiction plays into this? would you call this reliance on music as you describe as an addiction or something else?
I’ve reflected many times about whether or not I’m addicted to music, and how I can figure it out. However, I think that music also taught me to listen to my body. I’m also that kind of person that needs music almost always. I can’t fall asleep without music. And I can’t focus on studying without music. That’s because I need something to shut up my thoughts and focus on what I really need to do. However, sometimes I get so overstimulated by daily life that even listening to music feels heavy and difficult. In that case, I have to stop it and just listen to mu thoughts, or to the external world, even though it’s hard. I wonder if it really is possible to get addicted to music. And if it is, is it maybe a different kind of addiction? Probably the only addiction we can somehow control before it becomes problematic? Videogames addiction, for example, is very different. It can really become problematic, especially for younger people who use videogames as an escape from reality. So I think it would be really interesting to study and analiyze music addiction more in depth.
I’ve made this realisation not too long ago as well, actually. I was watching a YouTube video of someone who was talking about changing to listening to music without lyrics and how that impacted her lifestyle. It got me thinking of how much I listen to music to escape, even without realising, I always have it on. And when I don’t, the silence really aggravates me for some reason, so I’ll make the noise some way else; I’ll play a podcast, watch a movie or show, call someone or even just put white noise on. It’s embarrassing at this point… what am I trying to hide so bad? Are my thoughts that annoying? Do I even remember what they sound like anymore? And although you say it’s like creating your own world, which I agree, I also can see the downsides to it. I started forcing myself to stop listening to music in specific moments of my day, like when biking, going on the train/tram, and before I go to sleep. I want to connect my world back to real world, at least for a little while haha.
Very Relatable… This year I redefined my relationship with music. I remember putting on music just to listen to something and drown out the boredom. I did this for so long that music itself became boring, and silence would be excruciating. Maybe I’m exaggerating hehe…but in all seriousness when I started to treat music more as art, focusing more on lyrics and the intentions of the artist , combined with only listening in the evening helped me reconnect with my passion for music.