How To Be A Better Content Consumer
Don’t let them make you feel bad about not being passive enough
“Consumers face a dizzying array of entertainment choices that include streaming video such as Amazon Prime Video, Hulu and Netflix; cable channels and apps from outlets like HBO and Showtime; YouTube; and as many as 28,000 podcasts. With them all offering uncountable hours of addictive programming, how is a listener or viewer supposed to keep up? For some, the answer is speed watching or speed listening — taking in the content at accelerated speeds, sometimes two times as fast as normal.”
Relax: You don’t have to watch or listen to everything.
You don’t have to read everything.
You don’t even need to be aware of everything.
The secret of everything is that very little of it is very good. The problem is more things look better than they used to, so anyone with an interest in selling you a product (which in some cases includes themselves, as “influencers”) can make a compelling case that everything’s amazing, because seeming slightly better than the crap that we got when there was less of it available and more time to notice its flaws is, in our age of lowered standards and heightened demand, somehow the equivalent of actual artistic achievement.
We are so terrified of being bored for even a second that we elevate the most pedestrian of pursuits into unprecedented accomplishments so we won’t feel guilty about the time we spend with them. We tell ourselves that discussions we would wander away from if they happened at a party are, by virtue of being broadcast into our ether, worth cancelling plans to listen to so that we can be aware of the conversation. We force ourselves to have opinions about things that nobody needs to have opinions about and then, finding ourselves with opinions at the ready, we share them at everyone else.
It is okay to be bored. It is okay to not know about podcasts and television shows. You don’t have to read the new Jonathan because everyone else is reading the new Jonathan. You’re not going to enjoy that movie as much as you are being told you will or as much as you will guilt yourself into thinking you should.
If you find yourself watching and listening to things at twice the speed it is time to admit you have a problem. The problem is of course with society, but the first step to changing things comes from you. Stop watching things you don’t need to watch. Stop listening to things you don’t need to listen to. Stop paying attention to things that do not need attention. Be aware that almost everything being pushed at you falls into those categories. Most importantly, stop going on about all these things to make other people feel the same pressures. Stop liking and sharing. Right after you like and share this.