BBC Radio 3 has established a wellness thread in its programming, which means that programmes in its Sounds app are regularly interrupted by advertisements for mixes designed to promote ‘calm’. These mixes are a mixture of neoclassical and ambient music: currently, Ólafur Arnalds is promoting ‘Ultimate Calm’, with tracks from people like Nils Frahm and Brian Eno. I own lots of this kind of music: I have three albums of Arnald’s work, and a couple from Nils Frahm, and Brian Eno, and many others by artists like Goldmund or Murcof that tend to feature in these kinds of programmes.

Initially, this sort of music is moving, but if you listen to more than one or two tracks with this kind of sensibility the emotional palette starts to seem stunted and inadequate, a pose of a feeling rather than the real thing, a vibe rather than something more authentic. This is the result, I suppose, of following the Spotify model of offering streams defined by an affect (‘energised’, ‘calm’, ‘focused’) rather than by the artists involved. Calm starts to be not so much a feeling but how you avoid feeling, and mixes like this a way of making yourself numb, of not moving and hoping it all goes away. They are instrumental not only in the sense that they don’t have words, but in the sense of being intended to be put to use: the listener is meant to be using them as part of some self-care routine (one you can excel at: ‘Ultimate’ Calm!). They are a commodity produced by a neoliberal order that benefits from our finding ways to cope with living within it: their emptiness, their lack of real emotion, are what make it possible to commodify them through streaming. They sound like being depressed.

Sometimes the copy around them claims they promote ‘stillness’. But I think ‘calm’, in this commodified and empty sense, is the opposite of ‘stillness’, at least as Quakers, or Buddhists, or other contemplative schools might understand it. I don’t think you can consume anything if you’re still. Real stillness is not instrumental – it’s outside the conditions that make instrumentality possible. Not numb, not avoiding anything, just sitting with the mirrored pool. You can’t stream stillness.

Winter solstice and the festive break are full of romanticised offers of calm and invitations to inauthentic contemplation. Choose stillness instead. Happy Christmas.