The deluge of entertainment and information in our era is diluting our enjoyment.
H ave you seen that new Star Wars series? What was it called — Andor? No, wait — maybe it was Obi-Wan Kenobi. Or it could have been The Mandalorian. Or Ahsoka. Or The Book of Boba Fett or Skeleton Crew or The Acolyte.
As a Star Wars–crazed child of the 1970s, I am the prime target audience for all this content. And yet I haven’t made it all the way through any of these series, much less the glut of Star Wars films cranked out over the past decade.
What the producers now trying to wring every last penny from George Lucas’s franchise don’t recognize is that the thing that made the original Star Wars films special was their scarcity. Kids my age had to wait years for the next chapter to hit theaters. We obsessed over the scripts and the special effects, knowing it would have to tide us over until Lucas put out another one. And then, after Return of the Jedi wrapped up the trilogy, we revered them, never imagining that anything could come along to water down our experience.
But now, whether it’s the Star Wars extended universe or the DC Comics world, these beloved brands are drowning us. It is impossible to escape them. In the past decade, Marvel has produced 23 television series, adding up to almost 500 episodes. Where it was once a challenge to seek out merchandise related to your favorite movie or show, now it’s difficult to avoid.
The information age ushered in by new technologies seemed to most of us like a boon for entertainment, news consumption, and our personal interactions. But with the ongoing avalanche of words, pictures, and videos, we find ourselves living in an age of permanent ephemerality.
Sure, we enjoy streaming services that allow us to watch nearly every movie Hollywood has produced whenever we like. We enjoy scrolling through Twitter/X to get the news and keeping up with friends simply by checking their feed on an app.
But while in some respects this era of entertainment and information abundance has improved our lives, it has also devalued our favorite things. There is more out there to attract our attention, but much of it is cheap and forgettable. With so much stimulus available to us at such a low cost, “content” flies through our brains, replaced immediately by new content. Taking time to reflect is as outmoded as a landline.
If you’re of a certain age, think about the time you bought a new album, cassette, or CD by an up-and-coming band you had heard about from your friends. You were likely going to sit and listen to that album over and over until you formed a real opinion on its merits, simply because you were financially invested in it. To give up on a CD too early would be to light your 15 bucks on fire.
But now, every song and album ever recorded is available on your phone for the monthly cost of a single album. Trying out a new artist means hitting a few buttons and listening to a few songs. If you don’t like it, you just bail on it and try something else. You’ve invested almost nothing in discovering it, so it’s not worth putting in the effort beyond skipping around for a few minutes.
The same goes for movies. There are probably scores of films in your Netflix queue right now that you started and stopped 5, 15, or 30 minutes in. In the pre-Internet days, whatever you were watching had to compete only with whatever else the networks were broadcasting at the time. Now, any movie you watch is immediately competing with every other great movie or TV show ever made, so you toss them aside without any true mental investment.
Naturally, TV shows and movies opt for cheap gimmicks to keep people watching. Take the execrable Netflix movie Happy Gilmore 2, which seems like it took as long to write as it does to watch, but features 72 celebrity cameos. Hulu’s much-praised Only Murders in the Building has given up making any sense at all, as its plot serves only to crowbar in a parade of big names.
As for what we call the news, social media drowns us in information, making it nearly impossible to determine what is actually news (let alone true) and what is simply a cry for attention or an epic troll.
And the people who need the adulation know how to get it by constantly cranking out content that is only marginally news-adjacent. Take the U.S. president. In prior administrations, there was a reasonable expectation that when the president addressed the nation, he would say something important enough for us to pause and listen. But with Donald Trump, the news is nonstop, making it impossible for Americans to take a breath and reflect on his public pronouncements. Earlier this week, he argued for his tariff policy during his appearance at a memorial service for Charlie Kirk. The next thing we knew, he was telling pregnant women not to take Tylenol. Is it more newsworthy that he calls comedian Jimmy Kimmel a “no talent,” or that Trump appears to now support backing Ukraine in its seemingly intractable war with Russia? We will never know, because within hours, he will say something outrageous to draw our attention away from what he just said minutes ago.
Perhaps the most damaging aspect of the excess of information is the way it affects our personal relationships. It used to be that your circle of friends was composed of people you actually knew and saw in person, so you made a concerted effort to get along with them. Replacing real friends is hard. But online, when one can have thousands of casual “friends,” it is easy to treat many of them as interchangeable. If someone irritates you, you simply mute them and move on to the next one.
Obviously, this goes for dating, as well. Why invest the time and effort trying to make a new relationship work when every other person in the world looking for a partner is just waiting for you in your phone? Did your date make a joke that fell flat? Did he not ask enough questions about you? No problem, there’s another new face in a dating app. Every potential partner is competing against an online army of rivals, so there’s no incentive to stop and appreciate what you have right in front of you.
The more information we are deluged with, the less important it all becomes. In an era of constant dilution, we need to try harder to see and appreciate essences.