I’m lying on my bed, face up, texting a friend who has spent so much time lifting weights at his local gym that they don’t even check his membership card anymore. “If you’re so fitness savvy, why didn’t you major in health and nutrition sciences?”
He responded, “If fitness and health was my job, it’d become work. And I hate work.”
I think there are interesting parallels between that sentiment and anyone who has tried to make a passion a career. Almost four months in, I’m glad to say radio is still my passion. My eyes light up a little bit when I can use the descriptor “Arctic” non-hyperbolically. However, working at a radio station has an interesting change on how you interact with audio outside of work.
Now that radio is work, my radio listening habits have definitely changed. Being a millennial, most of my audio consumption doesn’t come from live radio. I spent my whole college years consuming NPR podcasts at a rate most people would consider concerning, or at the least, bad for my ears. Now that I live in the news cycle I find myself gravitating towards creative fiction podcasts (Archive 81, and Mars Corp. or Mystery Show) and non-fiction podcasts that aren’t news-centric (I recommend SFMoMA’s Raw Material). And I can’t help but stay stuck to This American Life, More Perfect, Planet Money, and the NPR Politics podcast.
Musically, I’ve infused my playlists with KNOM favorites and new finds from my old college radio station’s heavy rotation.
Check out this week’s audio podcast, which goes more in-depth into how working at a radio station has changed how we recreationally listen to it: some things a lot, some things not at all.
