A Space Without Headphones
On constant consumption, diminishing depth, and choosing what is actually worth your time.
Throughout this piece, I use the term “high-bandwidth Mavericks” and similar. If you’re more familiar with the language of giftedness or gifted individuals, you can mentally substitute that framing here. I don’t find the label myself accurate, but the underlying experience overlaps more than the terminology suggests.
Moving through the Berlin, while not exclusive to the city itself, I keep noticing a pattern among the people passing by. People with headphones on, or earplugs in, something always playing in the background—switching between podcasts, videos, articles, messages, constant calls. One thing ends, and the next one begins near instantaneously. There seems to be no real gap in between the input and the processing of it, just a continuous stream of input to stay occupied.
From my view, as the outsider in the equation, it looks somewhat counter productive. How much of this behaviour actually leads to new insight and, as a result, meaningful action?
If you take a closer look at what’s being consumed, the pattern is hard to ignore. The same topics tend to circulate across various platforms (and, suspiciously, at roughly the same times), the same people appear in slightly different formats, and the same conversations repeat with relatively minor variations. You can follow all of it, or just one version, and the outcome doesn’t really change all that much. It creates activity, but not depth.
Then there’s an underlying assumption that your time is always available for others to demand and occupy. Everything is designed to take a portion of it, whether you accept it or not doesn’t matter, and nothing is built around the idea that it should be limited to start with. No one seems to ask whether something deserves your attention—only how to capture it. Over time, that turns attention into something that’s constantly spent, as transactional currency, instead of being invested.
At some point, the question turn practical. Why invest in better devices (technology) if the input, for the most part, stays the same? Why buy better headphones to listen to things that don’t value on their own? Why upgrade phones, cars, or other equipment/tools if they’re only used to continue the same loop without providing new benefits? The issue isn’t access or technology. It’s that most of what passes through it doesn’t justify the time it takes in return.
I started removing things from my own environment for that reason. Not as a system, but by noticing what I don’t return to. Subscriptions that never get read or listened to, podcasts that pile up, content saved for later that never becomes relevant. Most of it isn’t limited by time—it’s actually limited by lack of interest. If it mattered, it would be used, intentionally, and not to overwhelm.
What remains isn’t immediate clarity, but space. A lot of it! And that space is neutral. It doesn’t tell me what to do or where to go. Nevertheless, without something to replace it, it’s easy to fall back into the same patterns—just now with more awareness. And that’s ok.
The only things that seem to hold for me now are those that involve some form of resistance. Physical work, direct conversation, building something that doesn’t resolve immediately into dopamine, being somewhere without constant input. These are much slower, less efficient, and harder to measure forms of input—but they carry continuity. They don’t disappear the moment they’re done or fade into some other activity without presence. The transition between the things, or activities, becomes noticeable once again.
That’s also the direction behind NEXUS Werkstatt. As a physical place. A point where people can step out of the constant stream and reorient without requiring yet another framework to do it. A shared space where conversation, work, and presence exist without being mediated or optimized. Not everything needs to scale or perform to have value. In fact, nothing really does.
What I’ve come to realize about the world, especially the internet and the online aspect of things, saddens me the more I come to terms with it. Most of what’s produced online never crosses into the kind of reality I just described. It doesn’t matter how often it gets repeated. It stays within the environment where it was created, circulating without ever becoming something tangible—something you can enter or build on. The longer you pay attention, the more visible that limitation becomes to the outside. And so:
What actually deserves my time, and what does not?
Once that line becomes clear for yourself, decisions will follow on their own. What remains isn’t less of everything, but it’s more of something, something defined. It has a reason to exist, and that’s worth pursuing over everything else that simply keeps you occupied for its own sake.
For more information on NEXUS, the NEXUS Werkstatt in Berlin, our 1:1 sessions, transmissions, books and other items, please visit our website nexuswerkstatt.com, or reach out directly.