When I was in college, I cleaned to Strictly Ballroom. It was easy. I’d put it on—on VHS, because I didn’t buy my first DVD player until the summer I graduated, and I was a relatively early adopter among my friends—and pick up and scrub my kitchen and so forth. Every now and again, I’d stop what I was doing and recite along to a favourite line or watch a bit of dancing, but by and large, it played and I ignored it. This is, if you think about it, an enormous luxury that we have today that no one through history until quite recently has had.

In fact, some early daytime radio shows were pretty well designed to be listened to while women did their housework. (Let’s be real; they were expecting women. Sometimes housewives; sometimes maids.) Before that, you did your work to the regular noises of life and your individual household. It’s not as though you could get a choir to follow you around singing madrigals, after all. If you wanted to listen to singing, you did your own singing.

And, yes, in a way I think we’ve lost something by not doing that anymore. Now, I don’t regret that my mom listened to news radio or the oldies channel while doing her work instead of singing; my mom has a monotone singing voice and sounds terrible, and having her sing “Barbara Allen” or similar all day while doing her work—or even “Barbara Ann,” come to that—does not appeal. Most people, though, don’t have that problem, and I think the average person probably knows far more movie quotes than complete songs they could sing while not singing along. I kind of regret that loss, when I think about it.

That said, I don’t think there’s anything wrong, necessarily, with my throwing on an episode of Due South or Mystery Science Theater 3000 when I sit down at my sewing machine. I can sing to myself, but honestly I find that kind of distracting when I have to do a fiddly bit. Since I have problems with silence, that’s distracting, too. Having Fraser thank people kindly or Joel warn me to watch out for snakes? I’ve seen it all so many times that I don’t have to pay attention, but if I choose to, I still find it entertaining.

I still use music, though I use the stuff I have saved on my computer and a lot of my friends use Spotify or similar. I even still listen to CDs, come to that. But be it music, TV, or movies, a lot of people have come to use our incredible ability to listen to whatever we want to whenever we want to as something to ignore while we do other things. Podcasts, too, no doubt, though I tend to limit myself to the extremely familiar. It’s one of the weirder habits of the modern world, though in this case I don’t think weird and bad are the same thing.

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