Q: Is it rude to keep listening to my podcast while my partner is talking to me about his day? I can listen to both, even with earbuds in. A.M., Clayfield, QLD
A: For about two minutes, I was standing in the kitchen, telling my wife about how I went to the supermarket to buy regular taco shells, but they didn’t have any and I was too embarrassed to buy the ones called “Stand N Stuff” so I came home with no taco shells at all. She was making a cup of tea with her back to me, hanging on my every word, going, “Hmm … ooh … wow!” Then she turned around and said, “Oh! Didn’t know you were there.” Turns out, she was wearing AirPods the whole time, listening to a podcast about the bizarre sex life of eels: how they swim to the Sargasso Sea, mate once, then die. She said, “Were you saying something?” I said, “Nah, not important.”
In our ear-budded, double-screened, tech-distracted lives, we’re only taking in a fraction of the world around us. I can’t get through a TV show without grabbing my phone to read critics’ reviews, then I accidentally find out the ending, then I don’t need to watch anymore, so I start sending funny YouTube clips to friends, distracting them from their TV shows.
Danny Katz is a columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He writes the Modern Guru column in the Good Weekend magazine. He is also the author of the books Spit the Dummy, Dork Geek Jew and the Little Lunch series for kids.