08/11/25

If I could summarize the modern world in one word, it would be "overwhelming."

Ever since the internet came around, it has become completely impossible to feel like I'm keeping up with everything. There are too many TV shows. Too many books. Too many podcasts. Too many youtubers. Too many twitch strems. Too much entertainment in general.

For the vast majority of humanity's existence, there has been essentially no entertainment beyond occasional music and verbal storytelling. People spent their free time with, you know, "Grug stare into campfire." Eventually there was the invention of instruments, and theater came along, and widespread copies of books could be distributed, but even still the literacy rates around the world were like 10% up until th 1800s. There just wasn't much to do for fun, so what fun we did have was valuable. Then TV came along, and as soon as there were more than ten channels with 24/7 content, it abruptly became impossible to absorb all of this content that was very readily available.

Then comes internet. Now there are thousands of shows and movies at our fingertips, too much to watch in a lifetime. Now self-published books and fanfics are everywhere, again more than you could read in a lifetime. Spotify gets several hours of music uploaded every few minutes. Even if you could somehow know the top 1% quality of content, you couldn't get anywhere close to absorbing all of this. It's overwhelming, and because there's so much of it, nothing feels important.

I like to read books. Let's use books as an example. If I were to read one book a week, I could do about 50 books a year. If I did that for 80 years of my life, that's 4,000 books that I could read in my lifetime. That's not accounting for re-reading anything. There are hundreds of thousands of books published EVERY YEAR. I can't even read a fraction of the books written this year. And 50 books a year is a lot! If I wanted to read more, when would I have time for all the movies and music that I want to absorb?

So I'm overwhelmed. How do I decide how to spend my free time? How do I pick the optimal books out of the piles and piles of options? How do I find the music I'd like best? What if I waste my time trying to watch shows the end up sucking? And then I feel a little foolish being so bothered by it, because people were so bored for so much of human history. We're really spoiled with content right now. And then when I read an old classic novel and feel bored out of my mind, I feel even more spoiled because that "boring" book might've been incredibly meaningful to thousands of readers, when by modern comparison it just... kinda sucks?

There's a sort of discomfort with spending so much of my day absorbing content, anyway. It's so easy to just get brainrot watching youtubes all day. So that's the big question, then. Is it better to absorb more, or absorb less? Should I put great effort into systematically finding the content I'd like most, prioritize it, and then try to push myself to read more, watch more, play more, etc? Or should I try to just... be comfortable being bored and doing other non-screen activites? Would that give more value to the content that I DO absorb?