I sat down on my couch last night after a long day of work. All I wanted to do was just turn off my brain and watch a movie.
Ten years ago I would have just turned on the television and watched whatever channel happened to be playing. But now I have access to several different streaming subscriptions. I open the first app and start scrolling through the newly added section. I see a dozen movies that look okay but nothing feels absolutely perfect. So I close that app and open the next one. I repeat this exact same process for almost an hour.
It is completely ridiculous when you really think about it.
We pay monthly fees to have access to millions of hours of high quality entertainment. We have award winning documentaries and massive blockbuster movies sitting right at our fingertips. But instead of actually picking one, I just watch the tiny trailer previews play automatically while I scroll past them.
The menu screen itself has basically become the actual entertainment. The sheer amount of choices completely breaks my brain. I am so terrified of committing two hours of my life to a movie that might end up being boring, so I just refuse to choose anything at all.
Starting a brand new show feels like signing a legal contract these days. If I see a show has four seasons with hour long episodes, my brain immediately calculates how much of my free time that will take to finish. I do not want to invest three weeks of my evenings into a storyline just to find out the ending is terrible.
So instead of taking a risk, I avoid it entirely.
The streaming platforms keep recommending things to me based on their algorithms, but they do not understand that my mental energy is just completely drained. I do not want to LEARN THE NAMES OF TEN NEW CHARACTERS in a complicated fantasy world. I just want to rest.
This exact same problem happens with everything else we consume now.
We carry phones with apps that contain every song ever recorded in human history. Yet somehow we always end up listening to the exact same playlist we made five years ago. We have access to incredible new podcasts and audiobooks, but after an hour of scrolling, I usually just sigh and put on an episode of a comedy show I have already seen twenty times.
There is a very specific and strange comfort in watching something predictable. We are so exhausted by making decisions all day at work that the idea of choosing a new plot to follow feels like actual labor.
It really makes me miss the old days of renting movies.
You went to a physical store, picked a plastic box off the shelf, and you were stuck with it for the weekend. You watched it even if it was bad because it was the only option you had in the house.
Now the options are infinite, and it just makes us miserable. So last night, after forty five minutes of endless browsing, I turned the screen off and just went to sleep. I realized I am just paying monthly subscription fees to look at digital posters.
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