I have now seen a bunch of people share this post about how terrible the Trim Silence feature is:
One of the more distressing qualities of humanity, in my mind, is the emphasis we collectively put on “efficiency.” It saturates our professional existence. It haunts our socioeconomic barometer. And it drives our current approach to both creating and appreciating art. It’s insidious, the inordinate amount of power “efficiency” holds over our daily lives, without even drawing much attention to itself, creeping up in unanticipated ways: the life hacks bombarding us on TikTok; the large language models we use to reduce the amount of effort we need to put into writing an email to our colleague; the Trim Silence feature on our podcast player of choice.
I agree, but the guy is kind of preaching to the choir here.
Mostly, I am glad that my life has somehow worked out such that I have never even considered using this feature. Neither have I ever listened to a podcast episode or an audiobook at more than 1x speed. The whole idea seems crazy to me.
What are you going to do? Save enough time so that you can listen to more podcast episodes, or get through All The Books? There are always going to be more and you are never going to get to all of them, just like you are never going to get caught up on all of the posts or everything in your RSS reader.
You’re not missing anything, and no one cares. Embrace it!