I Never Listen to Music at 2X Speed. Why Try to Live Life That Way?

I’ve been noticing a pattern: no matter how much I do, it never feels like enough. This make sense at work. The more I accomplish, the more money I can make, the faster I might get promoted, and the sooner I can wrap things up and spend time with my family. But I also feel compelled to do this at home too.

I catch myself listening to books and podcasts at 1.5x or 2x speed, just to get through them faster. Sometimes I even feel annoyed at a book—not because it’s bad, but because I have to finish it before moving on to the next one.

But I’ve noticed that I don’t do this with music.

No one listens to their favorite song at double speed. Or if they do, it’s by accident or as a joke. A song we love isn’t something we want to check off a list. We want to feel it. We play it not to be done with it, but to sink into it—to let the rhythm, the melody, the space between the notes move us in some quiet, visceral way. Music isn’t trying to get us anywhere. It’s not a vehicle. It’s a place.

So much of modern life feels like a podcast on 2X: efficient, optimized, and quietly exhausting. We speed up, hoping to finally “catch up.” But there’s no catching up—not really. Just the uneasy sense of all the things we still haven’t done.

And isn’t the goal to be happy? To finally relax? Isn’t that the whole reason we’re trying to get more done in the first place?

Living life at double speed is seductive because it feels like progress. But often, it’s just motion without direction—getting more done without pausing to ask what’s actually worth doing.

In Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman suggests that we stop thinking of time as a bucket we’re supposed to empty. Instead, he says, picture time as a river. Tasks flow past. We can reach in and pick up what matters, and let the rest float by—guilt-free.

My dad has a quiet version of this. When he finds an article in the newspaper he wants to read, he doesn’t clip it or stack it on some ever-growing pile of “important stuff.” He just leaves the paper open on the table in the living room. If it’s not read within a week, it gets recycled. No ceremony. No guilt. No anxious backlog of unread articles cluttering the coffee table—or our heads.

Burkeman brings this point home by retelling an old parable. In it, a vacationing businessman meets a fisherman. The fisherman explains that he works just a few hours a day and spends the rest of his time drinking wine in the sun and playing music with his friends. The businessman, baffled, offers advice: if the fisherman worked harder, he could grow his business, buy more boats, hire others, and make millions. Then, one day, he could retire early.

“And what would I do then?” the fisherman asks.

“Well,” the businessman replies, “you could spend your days drinking wine in the sun and playing music with your friends.”