Working

I almost quit because of one word.

Robert Petkoff, doing the voice, hits the old Star Trek: The Original Series computer tone.

“Working.”

Dead flat. Exact. Fully committed.

It pulled me completely out of the story. I remember thinking, this is ridiculous, and reaching for the off switch.

I didn’t turn it off.

I shifted something else.

Back then I was driving from Niles in Fremont into Santa Clara every day. Anyone who has done that run knows it is either thirty minutes or ninety, and the difference usually has nothing to do with you. Some mornings traffic moved like a system with intent. Other mornings the whole freeway felt emotionally unavailable.

Either way, I had time.

Enough for a story if I could ever get one to stick.

I had tried Audible before. Kindle too. None of it worked for me. At least that is what I told myself. Looking back, the problem was not the format.

It was me.

I was listening like a critic instead of a participant.

Every sentence got evaluated. Every voice got compared against the version in my head. If the delivery felt slightly off, I would detach from the experience and start grading it from a distance.

Somewhere during that commute, right after that absurdly serious “Working,” I caught myself doing it again.

So I tried something that felt embarrassingly simple.

I stopped listening like an adult.

I let myself listen like a kid again.

No scoring. No comparison. No constant internal editing.

Just let somebody tell the story.

Nothing dramatic happened after that. No cinematic breakthrough. I just stopped interrupting the experience long enough for it to work.

The series was Star Trek: Legacies. Different authors across the trilogy, and you can feel the handoff. The first book is tighter. The second wanders a bit. Years ago, that shift alone would have been enough for me to quit.

Now it is not.

Because I am not there to measure it anymore.

I am there to stay with it.

That one small adjustment quietly turned into a larger change.

One audiobook became a habit. Then a routine. Then hundreds of books over time.

Commutes that used to feel like dead space started feeling reclaimed. Long drives stopped feeling empty. Even ordinary errands began carrying narrative weight.

Nothing about the narrator changed.

Nothing about the writing changed.

I did.

I’m back on that trilogy now. Same voice. Same overly precise “Working.” Same little moments that used to eject me from the experience.

They still catch me sometimes.

I just do not follow them out anymore.

For a long time I thought entertainment had to justify itself intellectually before I could enjoy it. I thought noticing flaws meant I was paying attention.

Most of the time it just meant I was holding everything too tightly.

What finally changed was not my taste.

It was my posture.

It turns out stories work a lot better once you stop standing between yourself and the experience of hearing them.