I can't believe I'm old enough to say this, but when I was a kid marijuana was just marijuana. It was just a bag of pot. You smoked, you got high, maybe you got too high, but you didn't leave Planet Earth.
Now it's a drug. It's so unbelievably potent and refined that I find it alarming. I haven't partaken in 11 years, but I've seen and smelled it since then and I've talked to people who do. It’s not pot anymore, it’s a chemically-optimized pharmaceutical product.
I mean I still miss it, don’t get me wrong. I’d love to enjoy it again, in moderate quantities. But the average person should not have access to this. It’s just way stronger than it needs to be.
The same thing we've done with pot, we're doing with everything.
When's the last time you sat with a friend and listened to an entire music album, start to finish? I'm guessing your answer is "not anytime recently." We don’t listen to albums anymore. We listen to tracks.
According to Scott Galloway, there is an inequality gap growing at the box office the same way there is in the economy. Fewer movies are accounting for more of the overall revenue, the same way that fewer people are enjoying most of the money in the world.
My grandparents have told me how when they were kids, they would walk to the cinema and “just see what was playing.” Whatever was on, they'd watch it. Part of the adventure was the surprise; in fact that’s part of what adventure means.
Our generation opens Netflix, browses for 25 minutes while our food gets cold, finds nothing, and closes the app in disgust. “There’s nothing good on here,” we’ll say after scrolling past 36 different films that won Oscars.
There's a phenomenon of entertainment-flation eating away at our taste. Eroding away our ability to actually be entertained. We need the best only. We need to pack more entertainment into each second of our lives, because the value of entertainment is falling as we demand more of it. Same thing that happens to dollars or yen.
We can barely find joy anymore that doesn't come from a screen, and even with our screens we're getting pickier and pickier. Here’s another question. When was the last time you were watching a truly outstanding movie with one of your favorite actors, but still felt the need to pick up your phone and entertain yourself a bit?
My answer is “very recently,” and I’m betting yours is too. We’re no longer even entertained by one screen. Let alone zero.
Or when’s the last time you scrolled past an account you actually liked on social media, but the intro to the 60-second video was just slightly too slow for your taste? So you scrolled past something that you’d otherwise actually want to watch? Again, my answer is recently. And I hate myself for it. It disgusts me.
In writing, I have about one paragraph to get your attention before you start to wonder if I’m worth your time.
(Actually let me say this: I’m extremely proud of my audience. My regular readers are thoughtful and patient, and continue to read every week. I’m not taking credit for that — I'm not that good at sales. That’s because of you. And for that I applaud you.)
But on visual media, you literally have less than one second. “Entertain me right now, immediately, or I’m swiping you.”
Imagine a world where people need to be entertained inside of one second. That's where we are. That's Earth.
We’re losing our ability to find non-stimulatory happiness, and even that isn't enough anymore. I have written before about the paradox of choice, and how being limited frees you. But this isn’t just about choice. It’s about density, it’s about heft. It’s about each moment of our screen-facing lives being packed with more gravity and weight than the generously rotund abdomen of a Sumo wrestler. It’s about each moment of our lives being like a birthday party for no good reason.
In a time when recreation is so prevalent, when we have nothing better to do than chase sights and sounds, what can we do to be content? We chase only masterpieces. We're no longer willing to settle for "a story." We must peruse the entire app, the entire internet, the entire archives of history and find only the best story. The best entertainment, the song that moves our guts the absolute most.
David Foster Wallace envisioned a world where we found entertainment so complete that it ruined our lives. It permanently broke us.
For a long time I have thought that Virtual Reality was a dumb idea. An idea held by anti-social tech-utopianists who did not understand human beings.
But the more I think about it, maybe that's where we're headed after all. Not because people want to spend their time building fake, irrelevant realities… not because those realities are actually useful to us. This was my initial mistake when judging virtual reality. It’s not that those realities are useful or important.
Maybe it’s that virtual reality will end up being the only way left that we can actually entertain ourselves. To have the most stimulation you could possibly have. To get so lost in sights, sounds, and sensations that we don’t even have to think for ourselves anymore. To be entranced in a perpetual orgasm of non-thinking.
I'm guilty of this too. I don't listen to albums, I listen to songs. I don’t read “fiction,” I read “classics.”
But I also like to think that it's because, as a musician, as a writer, as a student of the world, I have better taste than the average bear and can't possibly waste my time on trivial things. I don't just read for curiosity or for fun, I read and watch movies to get closer to my culture. And I feel there’s more utility in the cultural touchstones than in random works of art. There’s more to be learned per square inch.
But maybe that's not true. Maybe I'm just too addicted to the sensation of the best, and I'm suffering from inflation too.
I do have the ability to sit quietly in a room, which is one of the rarest skills in the world. And I’m proud of that. But in the 10% of my life in which I’m seeking “entertainment,” I really am looking for the best. I want masterpieces only. You can fuck off with your Netflix Original Series and your Trending New Releases. If the movie isn’t an absolute classic and didn’t move and impact our culture for years to come, get it off my screen.
I think of Quentin Tarantino as a cinema purist. An old-school movie guy. I have seen him give interviews where he praises old, character-driven films that required patience and imagination… and laments the '90s shift towards pure action and totally predictable plots.
I think Tarantino is a goofball and I don't even like his films, but I'm also a purist like him. And I agree with him.
Maybe we’re just grumpy old fucks, he and I.
Or maybe we’re resisting a culture that has no pastime other than stimulating itself. And I think that’s worth doing. I think we have better things to do than having better things to do.
Drink some water and sit.
JDR
"Sometimes I sneak around and listen in subways. Or I listen at soda fountains, and do you know what?"
"What?"
"People don't talk about anything."
- From Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
If there was a cinema in your grand parents time maybe you're not that old 😂