our endless numbered days

hello! i originally wrote this piece over a year ago, so a bit has changed! i no longer have a spotify premium subscription, for reasons I will go over below, and also because of Spotify's meager pay for artists, rampant generative ai invasion of the music catalog, and their airing of ice recruitment ads. I still occasionally use the free version of spotify but have largely switched to buying (buying the essential word here) individual songs and albums on apple music or listening to cds.

the title of this piece references the iron and wine album "our endless numbered days". i highly recommend. ahead with the post!

time seems to move so quickly these days. this could, of course, be explained by the fact that we are all getting older-- the longer we live, the shorter certain time periods (hours, months, years, etc.) feel relatively. however, i think there could be another explanation for this time warp feeling that exists in our culture as a whole today.

the other night, I was hanging out in my friend's dorm room. she owns a collection of vinyl and cds along with a record/cd/cassette player (which I am very jealous of). when she asked what we would like to listen to, i eagerly jumped up to look at the options, excited by the novelty of her limited selection of physical media. i notice this term being commonly used nowadays-- with our increasing frustration with streaming services for music, movies, audiobooks, and television alike, people are turning back to the past and investing in some good old-fashioned "physical media". the endless list of options promised by spotify and netflix just isn't really doing it for us anymore, especially once we realize it isn't quite as endless as we think. We feel wounded when netflix ups its prices, or trades our favorite movie for a different one. We want-- no, we expect-- infinity for a very low price. And it's making us miserable.

back to the other night. we decide on tears for fears' "songs from the big chair", an album I knew some of the most popular songs from. my friend lowered the needle and we became immersed in the world that tears for fears created with their album. nothing else. no worries about queuing enough songs or getting in everyone's requests. just eight songs in a particular, unchangeable order, with a small break in the middle to flip the record to the other side. there was no obsessively checking my phone to see the name of the current song, or scrutinizing each to make sure i liked it enough not to get bored and skip it. 41 minutes and fifty-two seconds. and then it was over. that is all the music you pay for with the record (or my friend's grandfather paid for however many years ago). we put on a led zeppelin cd right afterwards, but nevertheless, there was a clear marking for how long we had been listening to music; where exactly we were in the night. somehow, this made me feel so much more grounded in reality than usual on nights like these.

contrast this to the majority of time i spend listening to music. i open up spotify premium, which boasts an impressive collection of music that for me, until recently, only seemed to lack joni mitchell (but now even has her music). i often shuffle my liked songs playlist-- a staggering nine-hundred and seventy-seven songs compared to the eight on "songs from the big chair". sometimes listening to spotify, i can feel my gluttony; so many songs, and me, so unsatisfied with most of them. everything begins to blend into itself; it's a cacophony of noise. i don't necessarily want to listen anymore, but i can't bear to sit in silence either. so i keep skipping, hoping to reach the perfect song that will be the thing I'm looking for to get me out of my slump. it really is a profoundly unsatisfying, even frustrating experience.

most nights hanging out with friends at school, we listen to spotify. oftentimes, we join one person's "jam" and add songs to the queue. even without this queue, spotify will keep playing music until prompted to stop. as a result, these nights have minutes that blend into hours. the music provides no sense of time with its infinite playing that eventually turns into a drone. there is nothing novel or special about any of it. unlimited songs, for an unlimited amount of time. we are lulled into a false sense of timelessness, before realizing it is indeed midnight and we all have things we still need to do before bed. without any sense of the passage of time, by the end of the night, sometimes you can feel like you haven't been in the moment or aware at all. i believe this applies on a larger scale to our usage of social media and the internet in general. with our unlimited, unprecedented access to information and entertainment, we feel an invincibility that is completely false. perhaps our brains are partially tricked into believing that our unlimited content also translates to the amount of time we are given in a day. but it doesn't. As phoebe bridgers sings in the track "garden song" on her album punisher:

and when i grow up
i'm gonna look up from my phone and see my life

when we are inevitably forced to look up from the eternal paradise (or hell) of our phones and computers, we will realize the nature of life has unfortunately not changed according to the developments of technology. we will still be mortal beings, and we may wish that we had been less greedy with our time, or had treated it more preciously.

-Hummingbird Panda