The Faux-Soothing Meditation App Voice Freaks Me Out
I can't help it. It gives me these deeply unpleasant chills of wrongness. I have no real idea why, and that's not what this piece of writing is about.
I think it rose to popularity because of meditation apps, spas, and various other hyper-optimized relaxation experiences hill-climb-optimized to it. [Note: possibly also ASMR? I'm unfamiliar with that as a media culture.] This is something that people appear to want, or be comfortable with, or at least not find particularly disturbing. I'm very glad for them. Comfort is a hard thing to find in this world, it's not unreasonable to prize what little you can find, as (in this case) it does no harm at all.
More interesting is how it is used. Much like other distinguished vocal mannerisms like uptalk, bothering some people can be an advantage - but that makes it unlikely to be used for business. I'm not certain why it's used for Secular Sermons although it's obviously interesting as an artistic choice. I cannot comment on the content of those sermons, or their possible merit -- I cannot endure that voice for more than mere seconds. But I think even the most sheltered lifelong atheist would be able to intuit that this is not the tone of regular sermons. So why was it added here?
Modern spirituality has become more and more therapy-oriented. Perhaps the rise of moralistic therapeutic deism has led many to suspect that the primary goal of a sermon, or faith in general, is to sedate you in a world of overstimulation? This gets projected from faux-spiritual things like Sam Harris' "I will yap in your ear about how much you're focusing on meditation" app, into a genuinely faux-religious artifact like a secular sermon?
Perhaps this is why I find many churchgoers frustrating -- of course they're not in church to discuss how to be a better human, particularly with respect to helping those in need. That's not calming at all!