I take burned-out professionals into Kyoto's gardens to listen

I run a small thing called Kyoto, in Sound where I take people out for a couple of hours somewhere in Kyoto and hand them a sound recorder and headphones. We walk slowly, we listen, and they go home with the recordings they made of that specific morning. I moved to Kyoto a year ago and noticed pretty quickly that most people visit a city like this to see it. But few slow down enough to hear it. The kind of people who'd get the most out of it are, I suspect, the people reading this: a phone in one hand most of the day, a tab open for work and another for the rest of your life, notifications that always feel urgent for some reason. There's a philosopher, Byung-Chul Han, and he's got a name for it: the burnout society. Too much positivity. Too much productivity. No off switch, basically. You don't really notice how loud it's all gotten until you stop. And these sound walks are mostly an excuse to stop (for a little while at least). We don't cover that much ground, that's not really the…