2️⃣127: Are You Not Entertained 🍅

I’ve been lowering my social media usage recently.

Instead of spending 2 hours a day on Instagram, I now spend two hours a day across Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Reddit, and my e-book reader.

This way, I no longer spend two hours a day on Instagram 😇

I’ve always preferred to consume written content (RIP Twitter, long live Emails) because it feels more under my control than watching videos. I’ve also never been someone who follows “Creators” to see what type of fun, new, relatable “content” they come up with. Nothing against it, and not saying there aren’t some hilarious, thoughtful, beautifully crafted posts out there that make you laugh, smile, think, ponder, and learn—I’d just prefer to do that at my pace instead of waiting through 60 seconds of an intro for people to share the information I was promised in the caption.

Not only is there an endless amount of content being pumped out daily, it feels like a full-time job deciding what we actually have enough time for when there are so many things to pick from.

It’s all so exhausting, and worst of all, feels so transactional.

I’m sad to say that’s what “entertainment” has devolved into.

A transaction between a #Creator who makes something for their #Followers to consume. Not enjoy, not sit with, not ponder, but consume. We live in the age of consumption. We consume everything. That’s not to say what we do has changed because what we do is still pretty much the same despite the major technological advances of the past decade. We watch movies and TV shows, we listen to the news—and we enjoy looking at silly little pictures that make jokes but somehow also touch on human feelings we’re all collectively going through but have a hard time putting into words.

Looking at silly pictures might actually be the one thing keeping most people going at this point.

Feeling like shit? Nothing a blurry picture of a cute cat with some text placed randomly around a sunset background can’t fix.

Yes, we all want to be entertained. We all hope to feel something. Luckily, we have an entire industry devoted to doing just that. The Entertainment Industry ✨ has been giving people a respite from their everyday problems for tens of thousands of years.

Recently, all of that has changed.

In the past few years—unlike any other time in the history of humans making funny faces and doing little dances to make other humans smile—have the viewers ever had a say like we do today. We’re no longer allowed to throw tomatoes, but we can leave a shitty review on Letterboxd or give a Rotten Tomatoes score so low it could end someone’s career or have a project canceled altogether 🎬

In a time when the barriers between artists and those enjoying the art have been practically erased, people relinquish their opinions to complaining and name-calling. Completely avoiding the opportunity to say something critically insightful about the piece of art they’ve just experienced. Someone pours their heart and soul into something creative to share with the world, and people tell them it’s shit because they didn’t do enough of that one thing that individual giving the review prefers.

When Star Wars doesn’t introduce the bottom-tier character book readers secretly yearn for, they riot. When a character they always assumed was White is presented as Black, they complain. It’s not that they’re racist. Never that. They just don’t think a Black character can do what the White character does. It’s as simple as that. Absolutely #NotRacist.

We’ve gotten to a point where people think that art should be what they want it to be. That it should depict things the way they want them to be depicted. If someone always pictured a character looking a certain way, and when that character is brought to life it looks a different way, they’re upset. They think the creators should’ve known what they were thinking, or what they posted on a fan forum, and should’ve followed their preferences.

Nobody is happy with entertainment the way it is. Everyone thinks they can do better. Everyone believes they know better. Nobody cares how much hard work it took to make an idea come to life.

What matters is how people respond to it.

Whether they enjoyed it or not.

Whether they think you made the right decisions for the characters and the story they had no part in creating.

Since they’re the ones paying to consume it, they’re the ones who get to say what is good and what is bad.

We’ve lost the plot when it comes to enjoying things that are made for our entertainment. That’s not to say you can’t be critical of the art you enjoy spending your time with. This essay is coming from someone who was so upset with a recent rap album he wrote an entire fanfic dialogue fantasizing about confronting an artist and telling them how much they disliked their most recent project.

Sometimes, you don’t like something you were really excited for, and you get upset with what you actually received. It happens. It’s okay to feel that way.

It’s perfectly okay to be critical of a piece of art for what its intentions were, whether they fulfilled those intentions, and how creatively they were able to do it. I’m not trying to dictate what Big Sean raps about. I just hope that when he does it, he does it to the standard of the top-tier lyricist I believe he can be, not a thirteen-year-old spitting freestyles with his friends during recess.

That’s it.

That’s what I want people to do.

Be critical of art for what it was trying to do, not what you believe it should try to do. We are getting too caught up in thinking about what we would’ve changed in a story to enjoy it better, or what we’re getting out of the “time we invest” in watching something. It seems we forgot the entire reason we’re watching that thing in the first place.

We’re watching to have fun, to forget about the world, to be transported to a different place and a different life than our own.

We want to be entertained.

Beyond that, art is also meant to make you think. To provide ideas and opinions you may never have had yourself. To challenge your beliefs, your thoughts, your view of the world. Many times, art is meant to make you feel uncomfortable. Some of the most impactful works of art have been impactful because they do just that. They leave a lasting feeling.

But that has become too much for people to handle.

Too burdensome.

People’s responses to a lot of this new entertainment being produced makes me feel like they believe a director, producer, or screenwriter should be spending an hour a day on Reddit and Twitter to gauge how fans are feeling—and use that creative direction when crafting their projects.

Go to r/AbbottElementary, and you’ll see comments complaining they didn’t give enough importance to presenting a proper living environment for guinea pigs.

Spend some time at r/TheWhiteLotusHBO, and you’ll encounter people complaining that some characters weren’t pointless because they didn’t do enough when there was still half of the season left.

Discussions about creative media today are rarely about the merits of the pieces themselves and their artistic value. Instead, it’s about whether they displayed topics according to each individual’s preferences.

We complain about the length of eight episode seasons, reminiscing about the days when shows had 22 episodes per season, but then we say that two of the eight episodes were just filler because they didn’t “advance the plot” or “nothing changed from what had happened before.”

Which one is it?

Do we want to dive deeper into stories and get a richer understanding of the characters, the setting, the ideas being presented?

Or do we just want shit to happen—to have a cause, an action, a consequence, and an explanation?

It feels like the point of consuming art these days is more about what our opinion of it will be, instead of the personal experience we have while taking in a piece. We’re missing out on the transformative beauty of someone else’s unrelenting passion because we think it’s more important to tell other people how we feel.

It makes me wonder, when people watch or listen or read things these days—are they even having fun?

PS

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