The time is now - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

Among some friends and those on social media, last week was a big one, as it was the week that Spotify, the biggest audio streaming service in the world, released its annual “Spotify Wrapped”, basically a bit of a round-up of your listening habits over the course of the year. It shows you who you listened to, how often and for how long.

 

For me, for what must now be the fourth year in a row, the specific songs I listened to the most were by Leonard Cohen, though, in a shocking turn of events (Cohen has dominated this list for me for years), he was not my most-listened to artist in 2024. Nick Cave was. So, perhaps the winds of change are blowing. That would be music to Lisa Boonstoppel-Pot’s ears (had she not just conveniently retired from The Rural Voice) as she said she’d grown to loathe Cohen due to how often she had to hear it secondhand here at the office, courtesy of me.

 

However, aside from the list of the artists I listened to the most, which came as no surprise to me - after all, I’m the one listening to them - what really stuck with me was the amount of time I spent listening to music in 2024. Spotify says - and who am I to argue? - that I listened to music or podcasts for 85,363 minutes in 2024. That’s 59.3 days (rounding up) and that doesn’t even include music that we listen to at home through another Spotify account on our TVs, mostly what the kids want to listen to. Of course, those figures are a bit skewed because I listen to music almost all of the time. I listen to it all day here at work, when I’m driving or when I’m doing things around the house, like mowing the lawn, cooking dinner, etc. So, it’s not as if I’ve sat down and done nothing for 59.3 days of 2024 (16.2 per cent of the year), all the while shunning my family and job, but still, that’s a figure that makes one take pause.

 

There are other similar time calculators, however, that are more representative of time you are spending away from things you should be doing or would otherwise be doing if, say, you didn’t have a smartphone in your pocket. 

 

On most phones (all, I’m sure, but I haven’t spent the time to research), there is a spot in your settings where you can find out how much time you’ve actively spent on your phone. That can be a truly depressing exercise. A quick spin through mine shows that I tend to spend between two and three hours on my phone. Now, there are practical and work-related reasons for some of that usage, but that’s still high. On a day spent at home, alone, that number climbs to the four- and five-hour marks. One has to wonder what, before the advent of smartphones, I might have done with that time; what we all might be doing with ourselves if we didn’t have them at the ready. 

 

In my younger, pre-marriage and childless days, I used to play video games online a lot. Games like Battlefield or Call of Duty were (and, I’m sure, still are) a lot of fun to play online and one of the more interesting aspects of them. You could see, over time, your win/loss ratio, your kill/death ratio and just about every other statistic you would want to know about your play in these games. That was another harrowing experience, finding out just how much time you had spent sitting in front of the TV and playing a simulation. 

 

During some of the more unsavory periods of the pandemic, I turned my phone off over the weekends, not wanting to engage with social media (my own or The Citizen’s) and I found myself a lot happier to be away from the hate. Perhaps a good New Year’s Resolution (not to skip right over Christmas) would be to be more present and in the moment. Think of all you could do with those spare hours.