I haven’t listened to many “general interest” podcasts (or radio shows, or YouTubers) in a while—you know, This American Life, Radio Lab, and their less-famous or non-NPR or more-niche-specific analogs. I’m a curious person, I like learning about things, and I will even admit to enjoying telling other people all about the things I know without them necessarily inviting such a lecture. So what happened?

First, another question: are “unboxing” videos still a a thing? Off the top of my head, I think of them as having started around the time of the early iPhones. They were videos of someone taking a new and generally high-end product out of its packaging. Usually there would be some light editorializing about materials, a dash of plastic film ASMR, and sometimes a brief look at the product itself. But the extent to which these videos did resemble a review was strictly for the purpose of communicating the relative pleasure of experiencing the object purely as a product and not as a tool. That format meant that the only qualification for creating these videos was simply having that hot product before most other people did, and the only thing these videos delivered was the thin, vicarious experience of opening the box.

To me, unboxing videos have always seemed insane. The host was invariably someone without much specific insight into the product category, with YouTube audience thirst oozing out of every pore, and sometimes an undercurrent of desperation spurred by the uncertainty of whether the views will pay enough to justify the expense of purchasing the product. I absolutely recognize the nerdy impulse to dive headfirst into as much content about your interests as possible, but unboxing videos always seemed like a pure “spoiler” to me: congratulations, now if you buy that product yourself, your own reactions will slip into a track already carved out by someone named Josh who is not a fellow obsessive but instead just someone with $1000 and an ambition to make a popular video.

So, yes, to tie this back together, there’s a kind of reporting/essaying common to those podcasts that feels too much like “unboxing the world” to me. Millions of young people will no longer get to have the experience of bumping into the term “desire lines” unprepared! Why? Because there are fleets of self-consciously thoughtful people, armed with microphones, plying the seas of emerging subcultures, niche industries, and overlooked places for anything that could feel like a discovery. Unlike when a friend tells you about something they have recently encountered, each overturned rock is offered with a kind of public act of introspection that seems to close the subject off to further contemplation even while it offers no conclusions. The personal, almost confessional tone of these podcasts becomes more quietly unsettling with each additional episode: learning about epigenetics just blew your mind last week, and now talking to someone from a failed 1960’s commune has you once again awestruck by the complex beauty of existence? Is this a meta-narrative about a personality disorder?

As I have gotten older, moments of genuine wonder—times when something new lets you glimpse a terrain of possibilities—have gotten more rare, and consequently more precious to me. As you age there is more that you (think you) already know, and you also must put in more work to maintain the curious and open mindset that enables these experiences. So I think the strength of my reaction is partly driven by disgust at the formulaic bulk commercialization—however well-intentioned and poorly-compensated—of this kind of feeling. But primarily I stopped listening because however many of those nuggets are still unknown to me, I would prefer to experience discovering them by myself or with friends.