Did Anyone Ever Die From A Podcast?

As soon as I finish one, I’m on to the next.

They are not unhealthy - quite the contrary, each one actually full of goodness; but no sooner is one finished than I’m popping the next. I do it without thinking.

I am almost blind to it.

It’s compulsive.

I know they will not kill me.

Nobody ever died eating podcasts, but there is something unhealthy about it.

And come to think of it, biscuits have a similar effect and these might, in time, kill me. Killed by biscuits. Not a good way to go.

Biscuits. Podcasts. Checking the phone. Email. Work.

Addictions come in many forms.

Compulsions, keeping our minds distracted.

But from what?

What is it I’m hiding from as I hungrily eat one new podcast after another?

Gabe Mate is an expert on addiction.

He explains that all addiction is an escape from a trauma. Trauma might be big - in his case, the holocaust, or it might small; an unprocessed sleight here or there. But clearly trauma plays out on the social level too.

How else to explain our collective addictions? Addicted to work, to checking email, to eating shit food, to unhealthy behaviours, to snappy, to defensiveness. We’re all addicted to something. Or many things.

Maybe these addictions paper over the clues.

i hungrily consume podcasts because I like to learn. They spark new ideas. And I like to share new ideas with others. Creative contributions. Wholesome and healthy. Mostly.

Occasionally however my wish to contribute, to be useful, tips into the unhealthy. Or, less unhealthy, more unseen. A wish to contribute masking an emptiness, a niggling feeling of doubt and unworthiness.

In some respects, then, our strengths are a mask, subtly hiding our greatest vulnerabilities. A tower built on sand.

Like our addictions, maybe our strengths are a clue to something deeper. In this case, a better understanding of our vulnerabilities. And in better understanding our vulnerabilities, we open the possibility, the opportunity, for real creative insight and transformation.

And if this is true for us individually, is it not true for our companies, our organisations?

Companies are always talking about transformation. Normally it’s from one IT system to another or something relatively important but essentially boring.

Yet now we stand on a precipice. A precipice of opportunity.

Can the coming ten, twenty years of work be built on the same models of consumption and waste as the preceding ten, twenty, fifty, 200? Do they need to be?

Work has been too stressful, too unhealthy. Our companies are too wasteful, too extractive, blindly ignoring their greatest resource - their people, and over using and undervaluing all the other resources necessary for us all.

The last six months have been an experiment. Many of us have spent long periods at home, not buying, consuming, eating, shopping. And, you know, what, we’re fine.

This raises profound questions for our economy, of course, for the livelihood of many small businesses.

But these are questions not best answered with a return to the old, but with a transformation to the new.

And maybe the answers, the pointers to the creative opportunity are not to be found elsewhere. Maybe they are to be found hiding under our strengths, in our vulnerabilities, or hiding behind our addictions.

Another biscuit, anyone?