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As we shuffle through a noisy world, a world that has forgotten how to listen, all we seem to hear is that silence is only ever complicity.
While some run from bombs, gunshots and humming drones, others are devoured by bad news, worse news and warnings of impending disasters. In our relationships, it’s either ghosting, or reproaches, judgements and endless calls to action.
In our digital solitude, where the deluge of ever smaller chunks of information pop up on our screens, interrupting, distracting, consuming our attention, we must quickly click, react, like, swipe. Making us believe that whatever noise we make contributes to a better narrative for our times, contributes to a possible peaceful future.
What we never hear or ask of each other is: breathe, be quiet, reflect, listen. In this constant state of emergency, there is a sense, perhaps a fear that if we pause, slow down, retreat, we might lose our interlocutor, we will be left behind, alone.
Numerous jobs and training courses are on offer for marketing, storytelling, how to speak with confidence, how to sell yourself; but never: how to read, how to listen, how to observe without reacting.
Listening is action, but it moves us beyond reaction, Ursula Le Guin wrote, “it is a connection. Listening to a conversation or a story, we don’t so much respond as join in — become part of the action.”
Byung Chul Han said that in order to be able to imagine a shared future, we must be able to speak to each other and to listen to each other, we need to build communities of careful listeners. Listening and using our imagination involves a deeper connection, not just one where we process data.
Perhaps our inability to listen deeply is connected to a growing intolerance for silence. A recent study in the United States asked a group of adults to sit in a room alone, with no distractions for 15 minutes. Most people struggled. To shorten the time, they could administer themselves electric shocks (which were tested and were painful). Nearly half of the participants chose electric shocks, one man shocked himself 190 times.
Meanwhile, listening is becoming both big business in the world of artificial intelligence and a political battleground. Jobs grounded in people listening to each other, the care jobs, are increasingly going to be replaced by machines. Those hoarding power, the predatory class, the genociders and their media propagandists are either gaslighting us, or doing everything they can to silence anyone that challenges them. From legislation, to smear campaigns, to assassinations.
While we should rightfully challenge our diminishing right to freedom of expression, we might forget that if everyone is constantly talking, nobody is listening. What then is the point of expression?
The irony of course, is that our only faithful listeners these days are our authoritarian governments, propped up by their tech overlords who mine our every word in order to categorise, compartmentalise, and criminalise us.
Listening, however, is not exclusively an intellectual activity where one listens only in order to counter what someone said, it is not about honing our arguing skills until we (think we) win, or are right, but to have conversations so that we may cultivate collective wisdom. In nature, listening is survival.
In ‘Decolonising Listening,’ sound artist Jamie Perera writes that when we experience sound, we are nature witnessing itself; “it feels good. Our bodies know the difference, the joy in being part of nature as opposed to something outside it. We realise we were never apart in the first place, and once our bodies know this they will never go back. We are nature through sound.”
This does not mean it is simply something one does during an expensive weekend retreat in the countryside, that is listening that has been commodified for western consumption, what he calls vapid tranquility without relational accountability. Listening is not an escape from the world, it is a deeper engagement with it.
This is why Perera says listening needs to move beyond a physiological act and be reframed as a relational and embodied practice. “As we move further into polycrisis,” he insists, “it will be harder and harder to defend listening as a soothing way to bypass the suffering of the world, avoiding grief and responsibility while injustices scale and children burn.”
While some are trying to foreground those who should be listened to, by claiming to ‘give a voice to the voiceless’, this is at best patronising, at worst colonial. Nobody is voiceless, our systems choose who is worth listening to. By claiming to give a voice, we are sustaining the systems that exclude.
So we should ask, who defines who is worth listening to?
Perera says we should understand listening as a cultural, relational, and epistemological practice shaped by historical forces, power dynamics, and worldviews. “How we listen, what we value in sound, and whose voices are heard,” he suggests, “is positioned in systems of knowledge, power, and culture. Within this one could reintegrate existing ideas of listening as responsibility, listening as respect to land, and with current areas of harm and injustice in the world, listening as solidarity and resistance.”
In indigenous cultures, for example, people listen to land, to spirit, to silence, to the subtle rhythms of life. Listening can be a moral and relational responsibility, about sustaining the social fabric. It can be embedded in ceremony, shaped by landscape, and informed by ancestors, or it can be something one does to break down the ego or to transform perception.
The key for Perera is how we can learn from these without co-opting them. The work involves questioning and redefining the mental structures that have been inherited, colonised and designed to oppress, designed to call something ‘other,’ he says, because this no longer serves us. We can all recover our ability to listen.
Words, Veronica Yates and illustration, Miriam Sugranyes
The Wave in the Mind, Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination. In her essay ‘Telling is Listening.’ Ursula Le Guin.
The Crisis of Narration, Byung Chul Han.
Silence in the age of noise, Erling Kagge.
Decolonising Listening, by Jamie Perera, Decolonial Thoughts, 21 June 2025. Read here.
‘Anthropocene in C Major.’ By Jamie Perera. Listen here.
‘The sound of the book, Entangled Life, being devoured by a fungus – with a piano accompaniment.’ by Merlin Sheldrake. Listen here.
‘The Art of Listening.’ Practice the lost art with our soundscape playlist here. Read about the stories behind the soundscapes here.
Sensuous Knowledge, Minna Salami.
The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer.
The Persuaders; Winning Hearts and Minds in a Divided World, Anand Giridharadas.
The Art of Listening, Erich Fromm.
“I know that the houses have fallen. We entered the world in them, wonderfully sure, that they were more durable than ourselves.” — Hannah Arendt
“The poets, by which I mean all artists, are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only the poets.” — James Baldwin
“Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.” — Hannah Arendt
Conversation (n.): oral exchange of sentiments, observations, opinions, or ideas; an informal discussion of an issue by representatives of governments, institutions, or groups.
“Everything that needed to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” — Erich Fromm
