These are the first ten seconds of my morning routine: wake up, connect my phone to whichever Bluetooth speaker is closest, and click shuffle on whatever playlist is at the top of my Spotify home page. I need my morning fix. And I get withdrawals if I don’t have music playing at every possible moment during the day: between classes, when I’m studying, even right now as I’m writing this article.
It drowns everything out. The outside world feels far away from me, like I’m watching it on TV. In this universe, only I exist; I get to control what I listen to and what I filter out. This isn’t anything revolutionary. Take a look at Cross Campus or any moderately populated place at Yale. The brands—Bose, Sony, Apple—might be different, but everyone has the same goal: to inhabit their own worlds where they too control what goes in and what goes out. If you have ever forgotten your headphones on your way to class and had the chance to see, and hear this situation firsthand, you might’ve noticed that it resembles a silent disco. Save for the sounds of car horns, the rhythmic ticks of a few bike gears, and the light shuffling of shoes, no one makes any noise.
Unlike a silent disco, however, everybody listens to something different. Everyone sees each other; they know that their bodies are all here, together. And yet, they are separated by their individual universes that exist simultaneously but never intersect. Everyone sees; no one hears. Each person on Cross, with their own headphones, listens to their own music. They do exactly what Spotify and Apple Music want them to do. E. Unibus Pluram. They mark the boundaries of their universes with whatever artist they listen to as they move through a sea of bodies. Everyone uses the music to reify their own individuality, even if their two-minute walk from the BowWow to WLH is too short to listen to a full song. Here, the relationship between artist and listener is one-to-one. Compare this with a concert—where the music comes not only from the physical instruments and voice of the artist but also from the crowd that sings and dances along. You’ll get a sense of what a difference it makes to listen to music with other people.
Don’t get me wrong, the last thing I want is to be seen as another one of those “hey-don’t-listen-to-music-anymore-because-not-listening-makes-you-more-present-and-your-mental-health-will-improve” self-help blogs on Medium. There is a real value in listening to music alone—in shutting the blinds, turning off the lights, closing your eyes, and playing an album. There’s also no problem in wanting to remove yourself from the outside world. It’s impossible to be constantly present, and there are much worse ways to escape your reality than listening to music.
The line between addiction and appreciation is a fine one. It’s too easy nowadays—with the advent of personalized, algorithmic listening—to crave music just because you’ve grown accustomed to it, to just let it coat over you. Listening used to be a more transformative act. Old mediums of consumption (i.e., records) involved a level of physicality that clearly marked when you were listening to music and thus when you should be paying attention to it. But because Spotify and Apple Music have made consumption too convenient for our own good, music no longer has to demand any intentionality on the part of the listener. You don’t have to do anything special; you can, and you are in fact encouraged by these corporations who farm mindless streams, to use it as background music, to have a song playing from the moment you wake up to the moment you sleep. You might be able to maintain an intimate one-to-one relationship between yourself and the artist you listen to, but does that even matter if you’re not listening at all?
Oscar Heller was the Opinion desk editor for the 2024-25 school year. He has also been a staff writer. Currently, he is one of the Editors-in-Chief for the 2025-26 school year.
