Listening, Luxury and Leisure
when we respect the power of listening, we feel the luxury of its impact ✨
“There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.” – Rumi
At a time when emotional connection and resonance is rare, where attention has turned into an economic construct that is numbing our senses on a global scale, where does that leave our ability to tune in and fully listen?
When it’s the little details in life that matter the most – from being fully present, to picking up on every word and reading the energy of a conversation – listening is an immerse, human experience. It’s also a deeply connected one. Even spiritual. That’s why when we respect the power of listening – and the presence of voice – we feel the luxury of its impact.
We know that the child who doesn’t feel listened to ends up as an adult that screams for attention.
Similarly, the adult who doesn’t value listening ends up as an emotional husk – dried up on meaning, suspended by the duality of interaction, defensive within themselves. When you starve yourself of the opportunity to listen, you restrict your ability to blossom within.
We need to wake up to the art of listening, especially now in this crazy-town moment of global politics with all the loneliness, stress and isolation lingering in its wake. Rushed decisions without the substantial weight of discussion and open dialogue is creating the political imbalance (both materially and spiritually) that we are seeing and living through.
The loneliness epidemic, whilst caused by several factors, is rooted in people’s inability, or lack of desire, to patiently listen to others. The reluctance to put the energy into engaging in conversational friction – the back and forth of disagreement, and willingness to listen to why someone shares a different point of view – is one of the reasons that listening has become devalued. We would rather swipe and say, rather than stop and wait for a connection to emerge. In the process, we miss out on unexpected synergy and opportunity.
Listening used to seem so simple. Things such as time, place, and medium weren’t a big deal. There were few distractions that constantly ebbed away at our attention. Now listening – quite possibility our most vital human behaviour and instinct for survival – is at risk of being perceived and viewed as a “luxury” experience, no longer a necessary one, because of how we place and use our attention and what we value within attention.
Listening is an artform. It’s a quiet moment of attentive observing. You improve with practice. It’s like listening to a song and picking up the rhyme and rhythm, the high notes, the low notes and all the things in-between. It’s a process of being aware of what moves you and the speaker, a delicate dance of picking up on subtle tone and meaning like an artist with a spectrum of shades to choose from.
When we fully listen to another, we leave a footprint on their soul. Some people may think that it’s the other way around, that when we speak it is we who are making the impact, not the listener. Much like the balance found in natural phenomena such as the Sun and Moon, giving and receiving, or wakefulness and sleep, the duality of speaking and listening establishes an equilibrium that enriches both experiences. If we speak and speak and speak but can’t solidly sit still to listen with curiosity, then the balance of energy is thrown off. Energy is wasted without any real reward.
Don’t be fooled by the silence – and overlook the splendour – of listening.
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I don’t know about you, but since Neptune moved into Aries on 30 March it’s as if I’ve stepped into a new timeline. The energy is different – more powerful and energetic, like a fire crackling into motion. Leadership has become a big and bold theme for me. This has made me think more about the role of listening, and the gold located within its intimate confines.
Increasingly, anything that is distinctively human is now being considered a luxury in an age of mass-market, mass scrolling and instant availability. Listening isn’t like that.
Nobody will listen to just anybody. They have to be a somebody to that person. Listening differs from processing. Listening is personal. It’s highly bespoke and specific. It’s intentional. It’s curious. When you listen, you seek to understand. If you don’t seek to listen and understand, why are you even involved or interested in a person in the first place? What emotional or intellectual motive is there to even bother?
Luxury is often intertwined with wellness, but to be well in the first place, as a basic need, we need to be intentional about who we give our attention to, why’s it’s valuable, and what is driving our focus.
In the luxury market, focus is now being centred on presence, participation and belonging – important factors when listening. Listening is centred around people, place and time. An emotionally invested person will listen. An appropriate place will tenderise the process and pleasure of listening. Plenty of time will add space and encourage meaning. These things are very simple. But they require people and a culture which values it.
It shouldn’t take the luxury industry to “nudge” us into valuing listening, as it has done with wellness, before we take action. Neither should it take a glossy marketing campaign to convince us that listening is a worthwhile behaviour, although it’s striking to note that we live in a booming time for commercialised listening (55% of the U.S. population over the age of 12 listen to a podcast at least once a month).
There is richness to be found in deep listening. It sharpens our emotional senses and make us more aware and alert. Knowledge speaks whereas wisdom listens. It’s the difference between what is being said and what is speaking to you.
In the years ahead, it will be the listeners out there – the ones picking up on and absorbing the exquisite multidimensional shades and expressions of human meaning – that will be the superhumans – the service-oriented humans – of our age.
Listening, as you so beautifully trace, is a human act but also an ethical stance. In a world drunk on self-expression, the listener is the radical, the dissenter, the one who withholds the impulse to broadcast in order to receive, absorb, and metabolise.
But here’s another twist: what if listening isn’t just about empathy or presence, but about memory? True listening creates an archive. A living, breathing library of others’ truths stored in our nervous systems, shaping how we move through the world. And in this age of externalised cognition (AI, cloud storage, outsourced recall) perhaps the rarest luxury of all is a human being who remembers what you said last year, or yesterday, not because an algorithm reminded them, but because they listened.
There’s also a strange paradox at work now: the more we speak into the void (posts, stories, podcasts) the more we dilute meaning. Like overwatering a plant. Listening, by contrast, concentrates meaning. It ferments it into something potent.
So yes, let’s not wait for another marketing wave to sell us our own humanness! Let’s rewild our attention! Let’s make listening not a luxury, but a revolt!