The Endless Media Epidemic

Two years ago, I read Raymond Carver's "Preservation" for the first time; it's a haunting short story about a man being stuck. The story begins with a refrigerator malfunction. When Sandy finds her refrigerator thawing - ice cream melting over week-old fish sticks, pork chops softening into putrid sludge, she turns to her unemployed husband who remains motionless on the couch. This isn't new behavior, since losing his job, he's occupied the same indentation in the sofa cushions, cycling through empty rituals: watching game show reruns without comprehension, memorizing newspaper death notices, reopening the same book to page 22 each morning.

This continues, day after day, time moving yet the husband remains petrified through his own inaction. The story's tension crystallizes when Sandy reads aloud from Mysteries of the Past - a library book about Neolithic bog bodies. One photograph transfixes her: a man preserved for two millennia in Dutch peat, leather cap intact, face peaceful despite the noose around his neck. Carver lingers on this juxtaposition: while Sandy scrambles to salvage their rotting food, her husband becomes more inert than the ancient corpse. The narrative concludes without resolution - the broken fridge unplugged, thawed meat cooked in desperate batches, the husband's bare feet leaving water trails as he returns to his couch. Time continues passing through spoiled groceries and unread pages, the husband in stasis, watching the TV. The refrigerator's persistent drip becomes a metronome for their decay.

When I think about these empty rituals, I can't help but think about the media we consume, how we've become the husband in perpetual thaw.

This year I made a conscious decision to transform my relationship with media consumption. Rather than remaining a passive spectator, I've committed to becoming an active participant - engaging with content mindfully rather than simply letting it wash over me. The concept sounds deceptively simple: watch intentionally, reflect critically, understand deeply. But the reality proves far more complex.

Have you ever tried to articulate your thoughts about a film or book immediately after experiencing it? Not trying to come up with a quirky Letterboxd hot take or Goodreads review, but sitting and writing down your opinions? Asking yourself questions: What resonated and why? What subconscious chords did this work strike? It's like trying to catch smoke with your bare hands - the harder you grasp, the more elusive the essence becomes.

The transition from passive consumption to active engagement proved more challenging than I ever anticipated - like trying to reprogram muscle memory etched over decades of media saturation. My old patterns were deeply ingrained: I'd finish something, considered that I enjoyed it or not and go on with my life, rinse and repeat. Even when certain works managed to pierce through the autopilot consumption - those rare stories that lingered in my mental periphery for weeks - I'd come back to them to try and re-live the experience, but often found the experience fruitless. Instead finding some solace in watching other people talk about them, seeing what they thought, re-living the experience through their first impressions.

Those haunting fragments of media that stayed with me became cruel paradoxes: I knew there was more, I wanted to examine them more deeply, feel what they were trying to convey, but they were elusive when I tried to watch them again. Like chasing the afterimage of a vivid dream upon waking, the harder I tried to grasp their meaning, the faster it dissipated between my fingers.

As I've said before, this year I've been allocating time to truly sit down and express my feelings about the media I've consumed. At first it was challenging - it's wild how after watching so many online reviews, I still struggled to know where to start. What should I base my analysis on when writing without reading anyone else's thoughts? I tried structuring my thoughts like video essay introductions and mimicking professional critics' cadence. But returning to reviews I loved watching, I noticed most simply summarized plots while adding little substantive commentary.

This realization made me question: What am I truly trying to achieve by writing what I think about stuff?

At first I wrote traditional reviews - "This is a 7/10 movie, liked x, y, and z" - without clear criteria for ratings, yet trusting I'd recognize a 10/10 experience when I saw one. I mimicked the ubiquitous rating systems and tier lists surrounding us. My pivot came when I stopped reviewing and started logging: no scores, no word counts, just tracking what moments made me pause, which lines haunted my showers, which character decisions lingered uncomfortably. While I'm still evaluating this approach's long-term impact, it has fundamentally changed how I engage with media.

The concept of "couch potatoes" used to puzzle me. In the pre-streaming era, the idea that someone would spend hours passively watching whatever TV happened to air seemed almost pathological. Sitcoms mocked these characters - think Homer Simpson glued to his recliner - portraying them as lovable losers squandering their potential. Yet today, that behavior feels much akin to the way we consume media.

In my opinion, there are two fundamental shifts that erased the couch potato from existence. First, streaming services killed appointment viewing. Since people don't just sit down and "watch tv" any longer, the specific concept sort of faded out. Second, and more dangerously, we've moved to new, more addictive forms of distraction. Social media and algorithmic feeds transformed passive viewing into active foraging - endless scrolls replacing channel surfing, autoplay chains substitute for scheduled programming.

This evolution birthed what I call endless media: content ecosystems designed for perpetual consumption through psychological hooks more sophisticated than casino slot machines. Unlike traditional TV shows that had clear beginnings and ends, things you could talk about with your friends or colleagues, endless media operates on dopamine drip-feed - TikTok loops, YouTube's "Up Next" queues, Twitch streams that never truly conclude. Just like the old couch potato model let you zone out when you reached you home and ended your day, now you can zone out at any time, anywhere, with infinite content at your fingertips.

The true danger lies in endless media's perfect camouflage. It's not lazy leisure but hyper-engaged busyness. We've replaced TV's single screen with multi-device marathons - scrolling Twitter while "watching" Netflix, playing a YouTube video in the background while you're eating, listening to a podcast while playing a game. Our addiction isn't to content, but to consumption itself - a self-perpetuating cycle where the act of watching becomes its own reward.

As someone who has fallen down the rabbit hole of endless media, my drug of choice being primarily both long (Twitch + YouTube) and short form (Tiktok) video content, it's such a hard thing to get out of because it's extremely easy to start watching as there is infinite content to suit your needs, and you never have to think about what you're watching, there never is any critical thinking about what you are watching because it literally doesn't matter.

Lets take youtube as an example, you can watch thousands of informative videos, reviews, video essays, podcasts, livestreams, let's plays, you can follow your favorite niche internet celebrity or stay up to date with politics, if you can think about it there probably is a channel dedicated to doing just that. But once you are done watching all those videos, what impact did any of those have on you, will you remember them in a couple of months? a couple of days even?

There are videos that are genuinely good, that have a clear artistic vision behind them, that are worth watching, but the algorithm is designed around videos that will keep you engaged for as long as possible. Even if you stray away from the mainstream algorithm-driven channels, you will find that it will adapt to your viewing habits, more and more recommended videos that you think "Hmmm, this sounds interesting" will be shown to you.

Soon those few videos with a soul will be buried under a sea of content that is designed to provide nothing but a dopamine hit. I'd argue this is happening on every social media platform and if I had to guess a large majority of the newer generations are down this hole and most won't acknowledge it. Tiktok, Instagram, Youtube, Reddit, Twitter they are all designed for you to hop on whenever you have a spare moment, and the second you start it will continue force-feeding you content for as long as you let it. I'm sounding like a grumpy old man but I'm not trying to be, I genuinely believe that this is a bigger problem than what is usually portrayed.

Games are not exempt from this, a pretty common sentiment I've seen online is related to people that like to spend their spare time playing video games, I've read multiple times people defending it as different from "mindless media" as it is "more mentally engaging than scrolling on your phone or watching tv", and it "requires you to be actively engaged in the content".

I understand where it is coming from but the second you look at the most played games in the world, you start to see a pattern, games like League of Legends, Fortnite, Valorant, CSGO, Dota, Team Fight Tactics, Overwatch, Marvel Rivals, you name it, What do they have in common? Multiplayer games with no end in sight - games that don't take too long to sneak a few rounds in between other tasks.

People play them for so long that it becomes an activity they can perform without thinking. These titles operate on operant conditioning schedules that make Skinner's boxes seem quaint. The amount of times I've heard people say that they no longer enjoy playing a game while still playing it every day is astounding. And single player games are not immune to this, with things like Roguelikes, they have no clear end meaning you can just keep coming back whenever you don't know what to play. I'm not saying that people making this games are evil or that they are doing it intentionally, but it's what our society gravitates towards. These games are popular for a reason, our culture has become one of constant stimulation, and it's hard to get out of it.

This all as lead to the rise of confort shows, confort games, confort media, things that are easy to consume over and over again, because it's easy and it makes us feel good.

Does all media need to have a clear end? I don't think so, but sinking ever increasing amounts of time into endless media is a problem that is becoming more and more apparent.

But how do we get out of this? I wish I had an answer, I don't believe society is doomed in any way, but I think that there is a need for us to be more mindful of our media consumption. Art is one of the keystones of human culture, yet we are slowly killing it, more often than not we are consuming art without giving it a second thought just as we consume all other media we come across in our daily lives. Our brains are losing the ability to think critically about the art and it shows on the media comprehension you see online.

People will see a movie, read a book, and come out with the exact opposite opinions of what the author is unequivocally trying to convey, too often you read something like "sometimes the curtains are just blue" from the same people that miss out of the entire message of a piece of media, even when it's clearly stated. Sometimes you want to be entertained and not think about the deeper meaning of the content you consume, and that's fine, but not ever taking the time to think about it is a problem.

The word "brainrot" was Oxford's Word of the Year for 2024. They define it as "the supposed deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging" I'm not saying anything revolutionary here, we all know it, but we don't do anything about it, and we barely acknowledge it as it has become part of our daily lives. The best way to describe it is that it's a slow form of mental suicide and we are all complicit in it.

I'm not saying that we should leave social media and stop watching content just for the sake of being entertained. What I am saying is that I want to start thinking about what I consume, going on without doing so feels like I'm just going through the motions, I feel like I'm sitting on the couch, the ice in the refrigerator is thawing and my feet are touching the water.