The Listening Room HQ

This post is a follow up of the previous one The Difference Between Action and Contact . There is a trap that many of us fall into when life becomes overwhelming. We start moving. We make calls. We send messages. We search. We ask. We read. We go from one place to another. We spend hours trying to change a situation. From the outside, it looks productive. Inside, it often feels like we are doing everything we possibly can. Sometimes we are. But movement and progress are not the same thing. Over the last few days I was reminded of something I had quietly forgotten. Activity can soothe the feeling of helplessness. Effective action changes things. The difference matters enormously. Activity often comes from urgency. It is driven by the understandable desire to regain control when life feels uncertain. It keeps us busy. It can even feel reassuring because we are no longer standing still. Effective action asks a different question. Not: "What else can I do?...

It is not unusual for some men to always be doing something. Those things can include work, messages, calls, solving problems, planning the next steps. It often looks like competence. A busy man living his life. However, at a point, action turns into something else. Often is something else. For instance, a substitute for contact. Contact with self, contact with others, contact with what is actually happening in the body, in the moment, in life. I have been noticing this for a long time. It is present in many men I know. Some conversations with a friend of mine are a good example. He is constantly in motion. Not just physically, necessarily. Mentally and socially. Always responding. Always engaging. Always moving something forward. If there is nothing to do, he finds something. It is not unusual for him to be on two or three different calls. Do you know those Wall Street films? Or TV shows like Billions or Succession ? Not that my friend is a billionaire or a stockbroker...

News emerged today, June 4, 2026, that those close to artist Marjane Satrapi have said she died of sadness a little over a year after the death of her husband, Mattias Ripa. Whether one takes that literally, medically, poetically, or all three at once, it stopped me in my tracks. I loved both Persepolis , the graphic novel, and the animated film. Like many people, I admired her ability to tell difficult truths without losing her humanity in the process. The phrase “died of sadness” will make some people uncomfortable. We prefer cleaner explanations. We like causes we can measure, classify, and place in neat boxes. Yet human beings have always known that profound loss can change the course of a life. Not only the body. The brain too. Anyone who has lived through deep grief knows that it is not simply an emotion. Memory changes. Concentration changes. Sleep changes. Time changes. The future itself can change shape. The world may remain intact, but the map by which we nav...

The other day I had a conversation with a friend about something very simple, but also very familiar: how easy it is to get pulled into the stream of news and world events without noticing how far you’ve gone. He described waking up and checking updates first thing in the morning. Then again. And again. Until the day is shaped around it. Not because anything new is happening, but because the checking itself becomes the rhythm. He also, like many others, lives with relatives that have the TV turned on news channels almost 24/7. I recognised it immediately. Not as theory, but as a pattern. There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from this. Not physical tiredness exactly. More like a scattered nervous system. A sense of being slightly everywhere at once, and nowhere fully. I’ve seen it in myself too, in different forms over time, not just news, but anything that pulls attention in small repeated hits. Tiny interruptions that seem harmless on their own, but accumulat...

Sometimes, a man keeps opening his workshop, garage, repair shop, or going to his allotment. Not because it still makes financial sense. Or because there is a queue outside. Or because he has failed to “move on.” Sometimes he keeps opening it because the place still belongs to the structure of his life. There are men who continue returning to old workshops, garages, allotments, rehearsal rooms, sheds, cafés, clubs, tiny repair shops, fishing spots, community spaces, even old websites, long after the practical logic has weakened. Modern culture tends to look at this through the narrow lens of efficiency. “Why keep it?” “Why not sell?” “Why not retire properly?” “Why spend time there if it barely makes money?” But often, the money is no longer the point. Sometimes the man already has a pension. Sometimes he has another source of income. Sometimes the mortgage was paid decades ago. Sometimes the business already shrank years earlier. And yet he still goes there. Bec...

Sometimes loss doesn’t give you time to prepare. Last Monday, April 27, I suddenly lost a beloved decades long friend. There was no gradual decline. No long goodbye. Just a moment, and then the world was different. When someone you’ve known for years, decades even, is suddenly gone, the mind tries to catch up. It looks for continuity where there is none. It replays ordinary moments, trying to understand how something so stable could disappear overnight. Grief, in these moments, isn’t always loud. It can be quiet, disorienting, almost practical. It can be gathering at a wale and funerary ceremonies with friends you haven't seen in a very long time. We catch-up, we immediately start talking as if we hadn't seen in ages. But the loss, the grief, is there. For many men, and some women, there is an instinct to move past it quickly. To stay functional. To not linger too long in something that feels like it has no solution. It has no solution. Each of us will deal with it in...