A Dwelling in the Current
Torrential Flow
There is a torrential flow of content. New podcasts, lectures, audiobooks, interviews, academic papers, talks. The flow is accelerating, and will only become more torrential. AI generation ensures this.
The torrential flow isn't only external or exogenous. We are generating a stream of content of our own, if we're living.
Zoom recordings of pivotal conversations. Phone calls. Voice memos captured while walking. Music produced in a DAW. Written reflections. Lectures we gave. Interviews we sat for.
Most responses to this flow are variations on drowning and withdrawal. We try desperately to keep up — to stay current, to process everything, to maintain inbox zero across an infinite stream. Maybe some weeks we'll be able in some sense to succeed. In others, we'll find ourselves dreaming of retreat — of going offline, of opting out entirely.
The Beaver Response
There is another way. Call it the beaver response.
The beaver does not try to keep up with the river. The beaver does not track anxiously what flows past. The beaver uses the flow itself to create a dwelling — a dam, a pool, a still place in the current.
This is not about controlling the river or stopping it. Content flows right by. Right nearby.
What's important is creating a place in the flow to live our life. A place where some substantive content gathers, settles, becomes part of our dwelling rather than something fluid rushing past.
Your Library and the Enjoyment Layer
A dwelling has an interior. What you've gathered-in from the flow and what you've made yourself — these accumulate. They need a home within your home.
Call that interior honorifically your library — the files you've chosen to possess, however you house and manage them. A folder on your computer, a hard drive, cloud storage. These are the materials you've committed to keeping, organized however currently makes sense to you. Your library is not only what you've found. It's also what you've made, transformed, and metabolized.
When you choose to possess content — to own the files, not just stream access to them — you're making a commitment. This is worth dwelling on. This I am taking to heart. This deserves to be part of my intellectual and spiritual home.
And you do not decide in advance what you will make of what you've collected. You don't keep something, knowing just how and when it comes in handy. You keep it because something in it signals to you: keep me. Then you create some space to listen — to dwell with it. You let it work on you over time.
A library you never enter is just storage. What's needed is an enjoyment layer — a way to engage with what you've collected and created. To dwell with it, return to it, let it work on you. At some point this stops being a metaphor and starts being a design problem — for example, what would software look like that served this kind of active dwelling?
An enjoyment layer would not be a file manager, not a task list or a progress tracker. It gives shape to your engagement with what's in your library without managing it. It lets you gather what you've kept around a question, an author, a theme, a season of inquiry. It welcomes return and repetition. It imposes no pace. It respects discontinuity — you can put something down for months and come back right to where you left off. It asks nothing of you in return: no review, no rating, no share, no proof that you showed up.
The hallmarks of an enjoyment layer:
- serves your purposes and no one else's
- introduces no ads, no algorithmic recommendations, no engagement optimization
- fits the shape of your life rather than requiring you to reshape your life around it
- accompanies and facilitates your engagement rather than directing it
- treats your files as sacred — never altering, moving, or claiming what's yours, working only with representations
- beautiful enough to make dwelling a pleasure rather than grim discipline
The app TAMBUZZTAM LLC has built is one such enjoyment layer — a file-first iOS app for power listeners built on these convictions. But the principle is larger than any single application. Any utility that helps you dwell with what you've chosen to keep, without inserting its own agenda — letting what you have taken ownership of slowly become a part of you — is doing this work.
Coming into Possession
Owning the files and storing them away in a library of your own is not hard. It has never been easier. You can download a lecture from YouTube. You can rip audio from a podcast feed. You can buy a DRM-free audiobook. You can pull a paper from a preprint server. And so on. Storage is cheap — a terabyte costs less than a meal.
For anyone who or whose friends are even slightly technical, the tools exist. What's usually missing is not capability but something like love — a bond with particular content that makes you want to keep it close rather than leave it floating in someone else's infrastructure. Sometimes what you feel bound to in this sense does not have quite the pink flavor of love. Something that is unloveable, ugly and even evil, can still be very very important. So a feel for something's importance is what's essential. When you recognize the importance of a lecture, a conversation, a piece of music, the deep desire to take it on, to own it, is natural.
Then you don't want it behind a login, subject to someone else's terms of service, capable of being pulled from your library, censored, redacted, classified as not fit for civilian use. You want it yours, in your filesystem, on your machine, a part of your library.
The word 'library' carries still some institutional weight. What once required a building, an endowment, a staff of librarians — the holdings of a university library — can now fit on a drive or two in archival quality. You have it in your power now to function as your own boutique institution.
And once you do this — once you deal with your own files, organize your own directories, decide what stays and what flows on — you reclaim something essential. You reclaim your attention. No algorithm is deciding what comes next. No curriculum sets the agenda or the horizon. No platform is nudging you toward something “new” or “BREAKING” that serves its interests. You're left with what you chose to keep and — by extension, and elaboration, and ongoing enjoyment — this becomes just you*.
What Listening Means
When you're speaking or writing, you're generating, controlling, directing. There's effort and intention. Even reading requires the active work of parsing text, eyes scanning, mind decoding, representing some voice and keeping up with it.
There is something free and light about listening.
Listening — especially sustained listening to spoken content — has a quality of receptivity. You're not producing. You're not reacting, quite yet. You're being reached by something, and creating space for it to work on you. In this sense, listening is primordial — it comes before whatever you might make of what you've heard.
And text can now become voice. The essay you wrote, the letter you drafted, the passage you copied out because it moved you — all of these can enter the listening layer of your life now.
Listening is prior to speaking, prior to posting, prior to acting and deciding.
It's the pause. The stillness. The incubation period. The founding.
This is time outside the economy of productivity. No output necessary. No engagement metric. Just the slow work of being reached, being formed, being upbuilt.
Dedicated to anyone attempting to build a home in the flow rather than being carried away by it — who wants to own what's important, to dwell with it, and who's ready to find over time that the dwelling has quietly made them – and not them alone – more and greater than they were before.