Background communications on ground, tower, tracon, artcc are useful. I listen to them too. From another ham perspective: QRU (Have anything for me?). It has saved me from grief a couple of times. TWR: …position and hold (to me), . . .cleared to land, #2 traffic landing downfield (to inbound) … Inbound: Ahh twr, there’s an airplane on the RW, we’re going around. TWR: There is? Me: Um yep! That one wasn’t anything I could do about. The tapes confirmed we were cleared onto the runway, but the tower was busy and forgot about us.
En route listening on freq gives me an opportunity to visualize the traffic in my mind with respect to my position whether I’m talking to ATC or not. The ADS-B confirms what I’m hearing now that it’s available. And sometimes it confirms what I cannot see visually. My last trip center called traffic twice in haze with fight vis > 30. Both me and my copilot who has eagle eyes did not see the traffic on both occasions, and the traffic did not see me. I turned based on ADS-B information and ATC confirmed my turn as appropriate.
Never close to a near miss but it shows we must know and watch. Continuation bias has an aviation term that means approximately the same thing: cockpit complacency. Fix that and you can fix a lot of things and we are all complacent at one time or other, so I try not to be complacent about complacency.