Lost in other people’s stories by Allison E. '27

I listen to a lot of audiobooks. In 2023, I listened to 28.6 days worth of audiobooks–while doing chores, while falling asleep, and sometimes even while doing psets. It’s something I’ve been doing since middle school, but I never really started thinking about the habit until coming to MIT. Why do I listen to so many audiobooks?

I think part of the reason is that there’s simply no kind of escapism like living inside someone else’s head. You get to experience what they experience–the fear during a dangerous situation, or the triumph of overcoming the impossible, or the rush falling in love. You’re thinking their thoughts and feeling their emotions and experiencing their highs and lows at just an arm’s breadth away. An arm’s breadth away is the perfect amount of distance for the human experience. It preserves the joy and the excitement and the intrigue, and it also protects you from the intensity of it all–from the kind of reality that slaps you round the head and seeps into the porous structure of your bones.

Living someone else’s life doesn’t just mean living through their experiences, though. It means you get to be that person for a little bit. You get to be that person who always has a quippy remark locked and loaded. You get to be that person with a genius idea for every predicament. You get to be that person so morally virtuous that they change the people around them.

Perhaps most importantly, living inside a book requires zero decisions. The story makes all the choices, and you get to just sit back and enjoy the ride. It’s especially a relief here at MIT, this big and scary place with an enormous amount of freedom. You have to make so many decisions–which classes to explore, which clubs to sink your time into, which people to build relationships with. Every decision feels like such a large fork in the road, and every choice feels weighty in a place that you’ve worked so hard to get to. In an audiobook? None of that is up to you.

I worry sometimes that the escapism is bad for me. That I spend so much time living in other people’s stories that I don’t have time to live my own. But sometimes I don’t entirely feel like living my own story.

I’ve occasionally tried to stop listening to audiobooks for periods of time. A cleanse, you might say. For a little bit, there are interesting thoughts that crop up throughout the day. But for the most part, it’s just boring. Sometimes I simply have no thoughts, and even when they do appear, the thoughts tend to start circling around and around in my head, descending into a state of nonsensicality. And then I hit a rough patch in life, and I end up escaping back into my audiobooks.

I don’t know if this is the best way to go about life, and there’s not much of a message here. Maybe a recommendation that if you’re also looking for a bit of escapism, try an audiobook. And maybe also a cautionary tale against escaping too thoroughly. :shrug: