In the best giant paragraph department:
Hot take: It’s okay if we don’t consume all of the world’s information before we die
…Consume the show. Gobble it up. Glean whatever little meaning you can and move on to the next thing. Clear the backlog. The new season of Stranger Things is on. Binge it in a day so you don’t get left behind. Forget it a week later. The new Taylor Swift just dropped. Listen to it until the new Beyoncé. Listen to that until the new Kendrick. Listen to that until the new… Fleet Foxes? I dunno. Listen to this audiobook at 2x. Watch this LinkedIn Learning video. Queue up that thing on YouTube. What’s happening on Twitter? Scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll.⁵ Look at this Reddit post. Read what’s on Apple News. Check your RSS feeds. Watch that new show on Netflix. Watch that new show on Hulu. Watch that new show on Peacock. Watch that new show on Max. Watch that new show on Paramount+. Watch that new show on Disney+. Watch that new show on Apple TV+. Watch that new show on Roku (lol). Wait what’s that actor’s name? Yeah, they were in that thing. No, no, the other thing. We just watched it. Yeah, we did. Yes, I swear you and I watched that. Yes, you have, you said you liked it, I remember. Anyway, can you believe what they said about Israel and Palestine? You need this promotion. You need more money. You need to upskill. You need a better manager. You need to network. You need to market yourself. You need to monetize your hobbies. You need to sell your art. You need to hustle. You need to count calories. You need to check out this story on Insta. You need to hook them in the first five seconds before they scroll past. No one wants to put in the time to listen to someone who can’t capture their attention. Trick them. Make them mad. Get them hooked. Make them crave more. Here’s another fucking Star Wars movie. Here’s why it’s fucking terrible. Here’s why it’s the best fucking thing Disney has ever done since it invented Star Wars. Here’s the first in an anthology series you’ll watch over the course of 20 fucking years. Don’t miss it. Oh, you didn’t watch Ms. Marvel? You’ll never understand why Reed Richards fucked this ox in the post-mid-credits sequence of Quantumania. Get ready for the multiverse. Get ready for the metaverse. Get ready for Spatial Computing! Get ready for the new iPhone. Write a review. Make a video. Smash that bell. Like that subscribe button. Kiss your dad square on the lips. I wish my dad saw me as a person. Get 5% off your first purchase by using code COCKSWADDLE. Thanks to our sponsors. Support us on Patreon. Visit the shop. Rate us on iTunes. Follow us on Threads. Enable notifications so you never miss a thing. Help, please, I am drowning and there’s only so much time left before I am completely forgotten, and I haven’t been able to do anything I thought I was supposed to do, and all I want is for people to see me and appreciate me, and I just want to make things that say something meaningful to someone, anyone…
When I worked at egghead, I found myself in a community that fetishized being able to consume “content” at 2x speed or faster. I worked closely with Kent C. Dodds who actually has a personal promo video that has an entire section devoted to his ability to consume audio and video very quickly.
I attributed the culture to the fact we were in technology eduction, a field that has to move at the speed of the new technology actually being released into the world, which is absurd and overwhelming. Once, an internal Roam Research video that had been made public was sent around, and when I tried to slow it down I learned it was actually released at 2x speed. You couldn’t slow it down. It was at that moment I realized this culture of speed was broader, and that the toolmakers attempting to facilitate our ingestion and organization of all this information were also victims of this underlying and overriding anxiety that we would never catch up.
However, Keenan gets at the real anxiety in that delightfully postmodern paragraph above (of which I have only quoted a portion!) — that is, while more of us have been able to create and communicate with the world, as I once envisioned, that creates more competition for the attention that would read those words, listen to those words, watch those frames-per-second, listen to those notes, agree with those ideas and finally affirm that our lives have purpose. I’m reminded of this quote.