There was a time when engaging with culture felt natural and simple. You watched something because it looked entertaining. You listened to a song because you enjoyed the tune or because the lyrics resonated with you. You read a book because you wanted to know the story. The intention behind consuming culture was to satisfy your curiosity or just purely because you wanted to.
Unfortunately, things are not the same anymore. Somewhere along the way, consuming culture stopped being just about enjoyment and started feeling like something closer to obligation. There’s always something you should have seen, something everyone is talking about, something you need to have an opinion on. It’s less about what you’re actually interested in and more about keeping up. And the thing is, it’s not entirely our fault.
Streaming platforms, TikTok, Spotify, Letterboxd – everything is constantly feeding us recommendations. The second you finish one thing, five more take its place. There’s no natural pause anymore, no moment where you just sit with what you experienced. It’s just on to the next.
Because of that, watching a movie or listening to an album doesn’t feel like a standalone experience anymore. It feels like preparation. You’re not just watching, you’re getting ready to talk about it, to rank it, to decide if it’s “worth it.” The experience becomes secondary to the reaction.
There’s also this weird pressure to be “in the know.” To have seen the show everyone’s referencing or to understand whatever discourse is happening that week. And if you haven’t, it’s like you’re slightly out of sync with everything around you. Not in a dramatic way, but just enough to feel it. It all just starts to feel like work instead of what it should be: our escape from reality’s hardships.
Now it’s not literally work, but it does take up space in your brain. You think about what you need to watch next, what you’ve been needing to read, what you haven’t gotten around to yet. Finishing a show feels productive. Starting a book feels like checking something off. Even the way we talk about it, “I finally got through it,” “I need to finish this,” sounds less like enjoyment and more like a task. Now, this isn’t true for everyone, but I do find it becoming increasingly true for the majority of the population, and this shift actually changes how we experience culture.
When you go into something knowing you’re going to have to have an opinion on it, you watch differently. You’re already evaluating it while it’s happening, what works, what doesn’t, what you’re going to say about it later. You’re not just in it, you’re lightly outside of it too.
I believe music feels this the most. Instead of letting a song grow on you, you decide almost immediately if it’s good or overrated. Albums become something you get through once instead of something you return to. There’s less patience, less room to just like something without explaining why.
Books aren’t immune either. Reading can start to feel like something you should be doing, especially if it’s something people consider important or relevant. And while that can be motivating, it can also make reading feel heavier than it needs to be.
None of this means that thinking critically about culture is a bad thing. It’s actually important. Talking about what we watch and read is part of what makes it meaningful. But when that becomes the main goal, when everything is about forming a take, you lose something. You lose that initial, unfiltered reaction. The feeling of just liking something, or not liking it, without needing to justify it immediately.
And there’s a weird paradox to all of this; the more you try to keep up with everything, the less any of it sticks. You watch more, but remember less. You listen to more music, but nothing really stays with you. It all kind of blends together. It’s not because culture is getting worse. It’s because we’re not really giving ourselves the time to experience it properly.
I don’t think the solution is to completely disconnect or stop engaging with what’s popular. It’s more about changing how we approach it. Being more selective. Letting yourself watch something just because you want to, not because you feel like you should, in order not to be left behind.
Letting things sit. Listening to an album more than once before deciding how you feel about it. Watching something without immediately checking what everyone else thought. Reading at your own pace without turning it into a goal. While also accepting that you’re never going to be fully “caught up.” There will always be things you haven’t seen or read, and that’s fine. Culture isn’t something you complete; it’s something you experience, and if we keep treating it like a checklist, we’re going to keep missing the point entirely.