There’s a particular kind of hollowness that visits me when someone asks what I’ve been learning lately.

I pause. I know I’ve been learning something. I listen to podcasts constantly. Good ones, long conversations between people smarter than me about things that matter. I listen on walks and commutes and while doing dishes. I pay attention.

And yet when I reach for specifics, there’s almost nothing to hold. A vague shape. The feeling that something important was said around minute forty. The memory of engagement without anything to show for it.

— Terry Godier, Phantom Fluency, 2026