He used to choose the songs

For years, a radio presenter in Doha did the evening drive. Listeners called in, he took their requests, he chose what to play in between, and plenty of people heard a favourite song for the first time because he put it on.

Now most of the people in those cars choose their own music. The part of the job he was best known for has drifted into their pockets.

There is a version of the next ten years where he spends them defending it. Insisting that a person picks better than a playlist, that listeners will come back, that his real job is choosing songs.

The trouble with that version is that it mistakes the task for the purpose. Choosing songs was how he did the work. It was never the whole of why people tuned in. They came for company on a long, hot road home. They came to hear someone who sounded as if he lived in the same city they did.

What he was trained to do is real, and it is his. But it is something the past handed him, not something it holds him to. The skills travel with him. The duty to keep using them the old way does not.

So the most honest place to begin is the sentence that sounds like a confession. I used to choose the songs. Said plainly, without nostalgia, it stops being the end of the story. It becomes the opening of a better question: what was that really for, and where else could it go now?