No Expectations 091: Burnout
An essay on getting away from the scroll. Plus, a new LP recommendation and a gig recap of Bobby Weir and Wolf Bros with the Chicago Philharmonic.
No Expectations hits inboxes on Thursdays at 9am cst. Reader mailbag email: Noexpectationsnewsletter@gmail.com. The newsletter I produce at my day job with WTTW News (PBS Chicago) can be found here.
Headline song: villagerrr, “Burnout”
Thanks for being here. In July, I wrote an essay arguing that it’s probably a good idea to recalibrate how you use the internet. At the time, I was overwhelmed by what being online meant in 2024: algorithmic feeds, endless scrolls, incessant ads, and constant distractions. I wrote that when you’re logged on, it’s important to take a step back and ask, “What’s making you worse, what’s affecting your mood, and what’s wasting your time?” In the months since I’ve realized this is hard work and figured it’s worth expanding on: explaining why I think there’s value in spending less time behind a screen and the steps I’ve taken to disconnect. If you’re here just for the LP recs and the weekly playlist, scroll down.
Also, it made my week to see Stereogum, a website I’ve been reading for half my life, shout out No Expectations in their news post about 22º Halo’s new LP. Life is really cool sometimes and I’m so grateful new folks signed up because of it. Sorry to have your first edition of this newsletter be a doomer essay on tech—it’s usually much more chill here.
As always, you can upgrade to a paid subscription or tell a bud to check out one of the artists you read about here. Next week, I will have a new Thanksgiving playlist plus a gig recap on Robin Pecknold and Hannah Frances at Thalia Hall. I’ll probably publish it on Tuesday or Wednesday to keep you off your phones and laptops during the holiday. Appreciate you reading.
Breaking Code Dependency: How Being Less Online and Hanging Out More Might Just Make Us Happier People (and Better Music Listeners)
Whenever I’m stressed out, anxious, or upset, my first impulse is to reach for my phone. It could be to aimlessly scroll social media, check my email, or briefly disconnect from reality, but it never elevates my mood. Whatever steps I take to recalibrate my relationship with the internet, to log off and spend more time with loved ones, I forget them in moments of temporary crisis. Speaking from experience, it’s a harder habit to break than smoking. As someone who writes a weekly music newsletter and balances a day job in digital news, I have to be behind a screen from 9-5 and during the off-work hours where I can write No Expectations. It’s not ideal but I’ve worked in online media for 12 years—long enough to know how unhealthy it is and how to reclaim a sense of curiosity, sanity, and normalcy.
I’ve benefitted from and loved the internet for most of my life. As a kind of lonely kid growing up in Michigan, it ignited and nurtured my passion for music: I found songs that captured exactly how I felt in all its messy intensity. Back then, I didn’t want to solely experience the magic of discovering artists who made albums that moved me, I also needed to learn more about them, where they came from, and how they did it. The internet encouraged that curiosity. Message boards and blogs taught me how to write, argue, learn more about the world, and develop a sense of personal taste and beliefs. When I stumbled into music journalism, social media became a way to get work, hone my criticism, toss off silly jokes, and make what I hope are lifelong friends. It’s why No Expectations exists, and why I got my day job as the newsletter producer at WTTW News.
The internet that sparked my enduring obsession with music, that made me actively search, learn, and listen, doesn’t really exist anymore. Of course, some pockets evoke the freewheeling, inclusive, and open fun that marked my earliest days online, but they’re harder to find and less convenient than what writer Hossein Derakhshan called “the Stream” in 2015. An Iranian national and early blogger, Derakhshan was arrested and imprisoned in Tehran from 2008 to 2014 on trumped-up charges for things he wrote on his website. When he was released, he was horrified to find out how social media had cannibalized the internet he loved. “The Stream now dominates the way people receive information on the web,” he writes. “Fewer users are directly checking dedicated webpages, instead getting fed by a never-ending flow of information that’s picked for them by complex –and secretive — algorithms.” He wonders, “But are we missing something here? What are we exchanging for efficiency?”
According to Derakhshan, not only does the Stream equate newness and popularity with importance and only show us more of what we’ve already liked, but it also makes the default mode of the internet biased against quality. More alarmingly, he sees an internet that, thanks to personal data-fueled algorithms, is “making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations.” While he also worries about a decline in reading on the web in favor of watching and listening, to me what he’s describing are crises in attention, curiosity, and connection. What don’t we notice when we’re lulled by an endless scroll? What do we lose when our sources of information are things that are fed to us rather than something we purposely seek out? What real-world experiences and relationships are we missing out on for digital convenience? It’s hard not to think of the joke about giving a Dorito to a medieval peasant when you consider what we’re incessantly and collectively exposed to online.
To be clear, when I mention things like the algorithm, the scroll, and the Stream here, I’m being purposefully vague. There is no omnipotent “algorithm” —there are corporations, made up of people, that are governed by maximizing shareholder value and a growth-at-all-costs mindset. While there are functional differences between Spotify giving you song recommendations based on your taste, Elon Musk purposefully showing you right-wing, rage-inducing content on Twitter or Facebook encouraging a 2017 genocide in Myanmar, I’m using these terms to talk about the ambient dread surrounding how our online lives feel controlled by things we don’t understand and can’t change. It’s the feeling of opening your phone and losing yourself for a half-hour witnessing things you don’t want to see, of constantly being bombarded with notifications and ads for things you don’t need. It’s realizing your attention span is shortening, your anxiety is heightening, and your mood is negatively impacted by what you consume online. It’s knowing you’re no longer the customer but the product.
The personalized internet era has coincided with unprecedented social fragmentation. Though the pandemic exacerbated many of these problems, these trends existed long before lockdown and well before the internet. In his oft-cited and influential 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, writer Robert Putnam surveyed American civic life from the 1950s and found an increasingly inescapable loneliness surrounding the nation’s communities: people were going to church less, social club memberships were declining, book clubs dwindling, and, yes, bowling alone instead of in leagues. In that book and his 2020 follow-up The Upswing, Putnam offers a variety of explanations for this shift: political polarization, segregation and sprawl, the rise of TV, generational differences, and rising income inequality. There are structural reasons for why we’re lonely, distracted, and disconnected but the technological algorithm-fueled changes in the past 25 years have only intensified these trends.
As the writer Magdalene J. Taylor points out in her Substack Many Such Cases, researchers at Stanford University surveyed heterosexual couples in 2017 and found that meeting online has become the most popular way couples meet. Every other real-world metric like through friends, work, school, family, church, etc has declined. (Meeting at a bar or a restaurant is rising, but researchers explain that’s because couples who actually met on apps reported where they first met in real life instead). The Atlantic points to research that shows from 2003 to 2022, American men reduced their average hours of face-to-face socializing by about 30 percent, while teenagers were down more than 45 percent. “In short, there is no statistical record of any other period in U.S. history when people have spent more time on their own,” they write.
“Ordinary people cope with loneliness in ordinary ways,” said Louise Bernikow, a writer who chronicled loneliness in 1982 for the New York Times. “They keep the radio or the television on for company.” Four decades later, the only thing that’s changed is that we have ways to check out and be behind a screen. Where loosening social bonds and disenchantment led to the rise of shock jocks and talk radio in the ‘90s, now we have an endless supply of podcasts. Moviegoing has yet to catch up to prepandemic levels thanks to streaming, and nearly 5000 theaters have shuttered. Though pop stars and marquee acts are breaking music industry concert records, smaller acts and venues haven’t gotten the same bump: non-superstar artists feel pinched from rising costs and independent venues are still struggling, many unable to return to pre-pandemic profitability. Why leave the house when Spotify knows my music tastes better than I? Why see a three-band bill on a school night when my algorithm-made “Daylist” promises “cottagecore” and “lo-fi beats” vibes?
I’m not trying to veer too far into technological determinism here. The loneliness, anxiety, and boredom plaguing us goes deeper than gadgets. After all, critics said similar things about newspapers, radio, television, etc. But none of those previous technological advancements can match how smartphones, social media, and algorithms are so primed to reinforce and heighten these already baked-in, decades-in-the-making negative feelings. “Social isolation leads to lots of bad things,” said Putnam, the Bowling Alone writer in a 2024 New York Times interview. “It’s bad for your health, but it’s really bad for the country, because people who are isolated, and especially young men who are isolated, are vulnerable to the appeals of some false community.” Many Gen Z men, who polls show have shifted further right than their parents, have been exposed to right-wing, misogynistic content on YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch. Young women aren’t immune to antisocial communities either: stan culture, pro-eating disorder communities, and other online pockets have not just made kids more miserable, but radicalized. Whether these technological forces made us miserable or personalized feeds are that way because we’re miserable, it doesn’t matter.
You might be thinking, “Yeah, no shit. Why am I reading about this in a music blog?” Well, one answer is that it’s my newsletter and I get to write about what I want—you signed up for this. The other is that the same deleterious forces that have made the internet Not Fun and maybe Actively Harmful are making being a music fan harder—not to mention making it harder for musicians to make a living. Though streaming made music convenient, and accessible, and led to massive profits for the industry, its low payouts have been disastrous for smaller artists scraping out a living. Music publications shuttered, arts sections are usually the first to go in local newspapers (I’ve been laid off in two different pivots to video: one to chase bullshit Facebook metrics and one for short-form vertical TikTok clips), and the ecosystem for discovery and curation is now the domain of algorithms or if not, influencers. Thanks to the glut of new releases constantly coming out, the album cycle feels ephemeral and artists are left wondering if their art has made an impact. Popularity and virality have replaced innovation and artistry.
When I was a kid behind a desktop computer, slowly developing my taste, listening to 30-second iTunes snippets, and learning what I liked, I viewed music not just as entertainment but as a window to a world that was foreign and magical. I’m grateful the internet led me down that rabbit hole then and not one of the much easier online alternatives young men can access today. It wasn’t until I was older, regularly going to shows, and making friends due to our shared love of music, that I realized that music is about other people. It’s about place, collaboration, exchanging ideas, and taking risks. It’s about community, fostering relationships, and encouraging others to join in. Just being out in the world, and exposing myself to new things, people, and perspectives, garnered an unfailing optimism in people and a profound awe for what art can accomplish. Immersing myself in a local music scene has been my life’s most moderating, therapeutic, and enriching force. It’s brought countless friendships and tangible belonging, all of which happened away from screens.
I don’t feel that same sense of joy and solidarity when I’m scrolling. In fact, it usually brings out the worst in me: anger, pettiness, neuroticism, and distraction. Now, you might think, “Skill issue—just log off,” which is true but I know I’m not alone here. Over the past few years and especially in the last couple of months, I’ve taken steps to curtail my exposure to the scroll. Some are small and silly like buying a watch to mitigate the incessant urge to reach for my phone. Other steps feel pretty good like taking a break to read or go for a walk instead of checking Twitter (or Bluesky). I no longer exceed the social media screen time limits I’ve set for myself and when I’m listening to an album, my once unabating urge to multitask subsides. I’m more comfortable with silence and notice things I wouldn’t plugged in. Though I doubt I’ll ever stop being a relatively anxious, high-strung person, I’m becoming less reactive and not defaulting to catastrophizing.
This isn’t a call to be a more active consumer nor a guide to “hack” your free time to be more productive. Optimization isn’t the answer but reconsidering how you click and scroll might be. You can lose your attention, curiosity, and sense of humanity if you stay too logged on. Worse, your connection with others could dim. I first wanted to write about music to channel the euphoria of sharing an album I love with my friends. That human-to-human exchange is the whole point. It’s why people make art, why communities pop up to support it, and why all of that will endure no matter what happens in the world. My biggest regrets this year were skipping shows because of burnout, busyness, or feeling down. Looking back, I’ve never regretted going out and getting to the gig. Like fostering your curiosity, finding music you like, or negotiating your relationship with the internet, combating loneliness is hard work. So is leaving the comfort of home, making friends, and actively supporting a local scene. All good things are and that shouldn’t stop you from trying.
A part of me thinks I’m too much of a doomer about the internet and tech (and I haven’t even mentioned generative AI until now!). Fixing these internet-intensified crises won’t be solved in a day but the most granular pro-social acts of kindness, community, and solidarity can make a difference. Even if that just means being more mindful online, that works too. Still, if studies showed that a ceaseless scroll, hours of screen time, and lessening real-life social bonds had no detrimental effects on wellness and mental health, it wouldn’t matter. (Keep in mind, they don’t). The truth is that life is better lived reading a book than scrolling, it’s better to seek out and discover music from people, to actively and communally experience it than to consume it from an algorithm. It’s better to talk to friends than listen to a podcast. It’s better to be present and around others than alone behind a screen at the whims of a tech company. Life is better with art than content.
What I listened to:
The No Expectations 091 Playlist: Spotify // Apple Music
1. Freckle, “Taraval”
2. lots of hands, “backseat 30”
3. 22º Halo, “CVS on a Walk”
4. Rose City Band, “Seeds of Light”
5. Hollow Hand, “Drinking with Judy”
6. Peaer, “Just Because”
7. Haley Heynderickx, “Spit in the Sink”
8. Lily Seabird, “Pretty Flowers”
9. The Slaps, “Compromised Dirt”
10. Casper Skulls, “Spindletop”
11. Smoke Bellow, “Pep Pep”
12. sunshy, “dissolve”
13. PFFU, “IS GOD?”
14. Bondo, “Paul Gross”
15. fantasy of a broken heart and Jordana, “Found You Again”
Bondo, Harmonica
Listening to Bondo’s new album Harmonica on the recommendation of Aquarium Drunkard, I was shocked to find out they’re from Los Angeles. Not that there’s anything wrong with being from there, it’s just that the indie rock scene feels a little more mellow, synth-heavy, and Spotify-ready than the propulsive and kinetic energy of this band. Imagine if the ‘90s experimental sounds of Slint and Tortoise had a slightly raised BPM mixed in with a little psychedelia and FACS-evoking heaviness. Much of the tracklist is instrumental but it’s equally engaging as the vocal offerings, like the pastoral “Paul Gross,” the frantic “Porchetarian,” and the broodingly wistful title track. It’s been a while since I’ve found a record in this zone that’s so refreshing and exciting.
Gig recap: Eric Slick, Twen at Sleeping Village (11/14)
Friend of the Substack Eric Slick is one of my favorite people. We became buds about seven years ago at a Whitney show in Philadelphia—his now-wife Natalie Prass was opening that run and has one of my favorite debut albums of all time. We bonded over a love of Haruomi Hosono, Yellow Magic Orchestra, and juvenile jokes and we’d catch up whenever he was in town with his band Dr. Dog or Plains or Kevin Morby or his solo music. I wrote the bio for his latest LP New Age Rage, which is a perfect encapsulation of Slick the songwriter, and Slick the person: adventurous, charismatic, and undeniably fun. His set at Sleeping Village dove into that tracklist—bright synths, palpable grooves, and techno-futurist anxieties. Special shoutout to drummer Fiona Palensky, who pulled double duty with headliner Twen. He played new songs too, which boasted a more indie rock palette as if Pavement listened to ‘60s girl groups. It ruled. Headliner Twen, which features Sun Seeker guitarist and Friend of the Substack Asher Horton, were a blast too. They’re a tried-and-true capital-R Rock band in the vein of Oasis, where bombastic riffs, Marshall stacks, and galvanizing choruses take center stage.
Gig recap: Bobby Weir and Wolf Bros at Auditorium Theatre (11/18)
One failsafe tip is to see the legends while they’re still around. There are exceptions of course, like when a tour falls into the “elder abuse” category, but just because an artist has entered their twilight years doesn’t mean they still can’t put on a phenomenal show. I’d already seen Bob Weir play three nights with Dead & Company at Sphere earlier this year so catching Weir with his other band Wolf Bros backed by the Chicago Philharmonic orchestra was a no-brainer. The Grateful Dead became my all-time favorite band over the past year-and-a-half and immersing myself into their Great American Songbook-tier catalog was one of the best things I could’ve done not only as a music fan but for my mental health. These tunes run the gamut of human experience—the euphorias, the losses—and they still have yet to lose their sheen. Weir’s set was beautiful. I finally caught a “Black-Throated Wind” and heard a full “Terrapin Station Suite” that took my breath away in the first set. When the band returned to the stage, they did a sandwich-heavy set of “Playin’ in the Band,” “Uncle John’s Band,” and “Dark Star,” centered around a stirring rendition of “Days Between.” While I realize I should’ve gone Sunday night too, it was a perfect experience.
What I watched:
The Substance (dir: Coralie Fargeat)
Each year, there are movies where my friends or folks whose taste I trust are starkly divided. This year, the most polarizing movie seems to be The Substance, which I thought was pretty fun but a little over-the-top in its incessant visual and narrative tributes to better films. Demi Moore plays Elizabeth Sparkle, a past-her-prime actress who was just fired from her job as a television exercise host. She’s offered the chance to take a “substance” that will transform her into a younger and better version of herself. This being a body-horror satire, it’s no spoiler to say that it doesn’t go well. I wish I had caught it in a packed theatre, especially for its final third.
What I read:
There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Hanif Abdurraqib)
Around six or seven years ago, I was pretty disillusioned with music journalism. Earlier in 2017, I was laid off from my dream job as the music reporter at RedEye Chicago and was scraping by on $250-$300 checks from places like VICE and Complex. I was thinking about giving up and taking a job at some marketing firm before I read They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Columbus writer and poet Hanif Abdurraqib. It’s probably the best piece of music criticism of this century, an expansive memoir/record collector’s diary highlighting Abdurraqib’s childhood, identity as a Black man in America, and a loving tribute to the music that made him. There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension uses the NBA, Lebron James, and Abdurraqib’s Ohio upbringing as the anchor for an electric, adventurous, and metafictional collection of essays. I loved it. Less a history on the game and more a personal lens of place, childhood, witnessing greatness, and embracing play, I especially dug the segment on catching a high school-aged Lebron James play against a Columbus-area high school.
Lost In The Future (Ed Zitron, Where’s Your Ed At?)
Our phones are beset with notifications trying to "growth-hack" us into doing things that companies want, our apps full of microtransactions, our websites slower and harder-to-use with endless demands of our emails and our phone numbers and the need to log back in because they couldn't possibly lose a dollar to somebody who dared to consume their content for free. Our social networks are so algorithmically charged that they barely show us the things we want them to anymore, with executives dedicated to filling our feeds with AI-generated slop because despite being the customer, we are also the revenue mechanism. Our search engines do less as a means of making us use them more, our dating apps have become vehicles for private equity to add a toll to falling in love, our video games are constantly nagging us to give them more money, and despite it costing money and being attached to our account, we don't actually own any of the streaming media we purchase. We're drowning in spam — both in our emails and on our phones — and at this point in our lives we're probably agreed to 3 million pages worth of privacy policies allowing companies to use our information as they see fit.
And these are issues that hit everything we do, all the time, constantly, unrelentingly. Technology is our lives now. We wake up, we use our phone, we check our texts (three spam calls, two spam texts), we look at our bank balance (two-factor authentication check), we read the news (a quarter of the page is blocked by an advertisement asking for our email that's deliberately built to hide the button to get rid of it, or a login screen because we got logged out somehow), we check social media (after being shown an ad every two clicks), and then we log onto Slack (and feel a pang of anxiety as 15 different notifications appear).
The Weekly Chicago Show Calendar:
The gig calendar lives on the WTTW News website now. You can also subscribe to the newsletter I produce there called Daily Chicagoan to get it a day early.
"That human-to-human exchange is the whole point. It’s why people make art, why communities pop up to support it, and why all of that will endure no matter what happens in the world. "
I think this is the answer to Derakhshan's question about what we're giving up in the name of efficiency. IMO, that's also why indie newsletters, blogs, etc. are thriving. Older people are realizing that Web 1.0 was pretty rad- certainly compared to what we have today, and younger people are seeing that there's an alternative to machine learning.
Thank you for writing this. I came of age pretty much right after the internet you describe. I remember finding spotify my freshman year of high school, it was brand new! The Feed and it's attendant consequences have had a deleterious effect on my life and the lives of friends. After a scary mental health episode earlier this year a very intentional friend of mine from high school began to reach out. We would go to a show once, twice, maybe three times a week. It saved my life and it deepened my connection to music. I made a good faith effort for this year to be my year of Chicago music, that's how I found your writing. This process of discovery has been far more rewarding then letting the stream choose for me. I wouldn't be writing this if you hadn't mentioned school nights. I work in CPS in a neighborhood where the nearest venue is maybe 40 minutes away (i love this neighborhood and the open mic are incredible but the venues are FAR). The grind of the school year is getting to me, but giving myself grace and perhaps thinking of the Chicago winter as a sort of off season might help. A time to review the gains made this year and plan for the next. And time to get my damn turntable fixed. Thanks for writing Josh!