There are strangers in my ears. A bustling town of them, their voices and backstories far better known to me than can possibly be healthy. These people—my people, I can’t not think of them that way—inhabit what used to be the exclusive domain of weirdos and dreamers. Then the Silicon Valley unicorns and Whole Foods marketing whizzes came loping in, and now just about everyone harbors fantasies of relocating to this promised land where self-expression and self-optimization reign supreme. Conan O’Brien found a place there a few months ago. Lena Dunham, too.

I listened to my first podcast in 2005, when I was single and working from home. My office was a closet I’d emptied out and filled with a desk, a chair, and a cordless telephone that I used for my daily call with my one friend who could stand to chat with me during work hours. When he and I weren’t talking, I was alone with the sounds of the radiator and the B71 bus that periodically hissed by outside my window. The wimpy indie rock I sometimes bothered to play didn’t do much to animate the scene. I suppose I could have adopted a cat, but I am allergic. I was a perfect target for Slate’s new experiment, a weekly political audio show. The chatter on offer was sharp and quick but, maybe more important, it filled the room with what felt like life. Unlike talk radio, which went on with or without me, these new recordings were engineered to sit tight until the very moment I summoned them into being. I listened at home, or uploaded onto my iPod and jogged and grocery shopped and rode the subway in a perpetual one-way conversation.

The show’s trio of anchors got their hooks into me, and I listened and listened until I felt I had their personalities memorized and I could predict their reactions. In these early podcast days, the scene was awash in established radio and television shows that had been converted to podcast form, but my tastes veered toward the rawer, low-fi programs that were conceived as podcasts first. My circle of disembodied voices expanded to include an expert in Canadian indie rock, a sardonic Andrew Lloyd Webber fanatic who had a complicated relationship with her mother, and a well-connected standup comedian I’d never heard of before. I faithfully listened to my pod people, and when I joined Twitter I followed them there. They did not follow me back, even when I @d things at them, which I found quite rude. They’d wormed their way into my psyche. It was hard to shake the sense that our connection couldn’t have been more intimate or true.

We’re now in what New York declares the podcast’s “golden age.”66,000 shows, showers of seed money, elevator-talk domination. Spotify reportedly paid around $230 million for the Brooklyn-based podcast production company Gimlet. Julia Roberts now stars in an Amazon Studio television series that started out as a podcast. My mother listens to podcasts. My daughter, who is four, listens to me listening to them. “It’s a show where somebody doesn’t read you a story but they tell you a story,” is how she sums it up. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but it’s the voice that has us all under its spell.

My tenure as a podhead has sustained and outlasted two pregnancies, two career shifts, and a recent foray into being a pothead (edibles, to help me sleep). My insomnia is a natural enabler for my podcast obsession. According to my streaming app, I have listened to 5,010 hours and 18,873 episodes since 2010. Podcasts aren’t just for when I’m craving stimulation and human connection, the modern woman’s porn. They’re what I turn to when I’m frozen with anxiety at 2:43 a.m. Too tired to read, my limbs too stiff to trudge down the hall to the television, I stay in bed, plug in my headphones, and let my fill-in friends’ voices wash over me. The erasure effect is practically instantaneous. My stupid internal monologue evaporates in the face of talk of best jade roller practices or the hidden meanings of Kanye West lyrics. Everyone’s an expert on planet pod, and even when I’m at my most passive, I’m a paragon of self-improvement. There’s a comforting artifice of looseness to the chatter, a surfeit of personality without ever getting too personal. I know the names of my hosts’ children. I track their wedding plans and pregnancies. Mostly, though, I listen to them keep the conversational ball aloft and I drift back to sleep.

I used to have dreams about losing my teeth. Now it’s about watching helplessly as my earbuds disappear into a dark body of water. I need them to fall asleep (audibles are mightier than edibles, turns out). Sometimes my pod people appear in my dreams, saying the same things as they do in the recording, but they’re talking to me. One night I had a dream that a host, a woman I used to work with, was talking about me. I listened again the following morning and was startled to discover that she had in fact brought me up. (The hosts were discussing a Garfield-themed café in Toronto, and I am half-Canadian.)
A couple years ago, I went to a party where I was introduced to one of my favorite pod people, a whiz on pop culture and politics. This micro-celebrity was my personal Madonna, and I lingered by her side. But hearing the tone and cadences that I knew so intimately coming out of an unfamiliar face was deeply unnerving. The pink of her gums and crinkles by her eyes did not belong to her voice. I had to look away.

My husband and I had a fight the other night. It was a ridiculous fight, about how to cook salmon. Nevertheless, fighting is distressing, and I was distraught. When it became clear that we were stuck in a short circuit of I-told-you-sos, I stalked off to another room. I needed somebody to listen to me and tell me that I was right. It was nearly nine, though, and I knew better than to go ruining a friend’s Saturday night. Besides, nobody likes to talk on the phone anymore.

So I pulled up the new episode of a beauty podcast that I never miss. The hosts were posing questions to a charming English chemist about the differences in laundry detergent scents around the world. It was bizarrely interesting, and even more calming. I eventually returned to the living room, where my husband was reading a magazine. He and I exchanged looks of embarrassment and proceeded to have a sweet evening together.
“You should start a podcast!” is something that I hear, I suspect, more than the average person. After all, I am a writer who makes no secret of her podcast obsession. The closest I’ve come to giving it a go, though, was showing up at a live taping of a friend’s show to be one of three guests. When it was my turn to take the seat by the microphone and pose the question we had worked out in advance, I forgot my lines and spoke in faltering loop-de-loops. The morning after the taping, my friend emailed me to inform me that she had some bad news. The editor had to cut me from the episode, on account of “time constraints.” I should have been embarrassed, but I was grateful to be released back into the realm where I belonged. I told her it was fine, really. And then I pulled up the episode and pressed play.

Lauren Mechling is the author of How Could She, coming out in June.

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