The Infinite Content Merry-Go-Round
This isn't your grandmother's carnival ride
Last summer, I attended a baseball game with some buddies.
Since the stadium was a ways away, we ordered an Uber XL. I forgot to call shotgun, so I had to sit in the back (even though I’m the tallest). Ya know… that third row kind of back where you’ve got to tap into your inner gymnast just to fit.
From the instant the door slammed shut, everybody whipped out their phones.
An underappreciated benefit about the back row — getting to be slightly elevated like a king on his throne overlooking his kingdom. So I saw what everyone was consuming while scrolling through their social media feeds with laser focus.
One observation surprised me: all of my friends had feasted on content uploaded within the past few hours.
Anything more than a day old was nonexistent. More than a week old? Fuhgeddaboudit.
I fall into the same trap. Don’t you?
The entire business model of insert social media platform locks us into an infinite content merry-go-round. Like rats, we live in a never-ending maze hunting for fresh cheese around each corner. No matter how fast the merry-go-round spins, it stays put. Stuck in the present, our feet are sinking ever deeper into the quicksand of novelty and triviality.
All while having access to the real life Library of Alexandria at our fingertips. Thanks to the Internet, we’re only a hop and a click away from the works of Aristotle and Dostoevsky, yet we settle for the likes of D’Amelio and the Paul brothers. We’ve chosen mindless entertainment over timeless wisdom.
We’re stuck on this infinite content merry-go-round — ignoring time-tested knowledge, overfed and undernourished with mental junk food, blissfully unaware of anything created more than a few hours ago.
I’ll end with a question since I don’t have an answer: How can we make ancient wisdom cool again rather than the shiny new content of the hour?
I’m not suggesting that we leave the carnival entirely, but perhaps we could try a few other rides.
I love seeing your face pop up in my likes and responding to your insightful comments below.
My sense of what drives the novelty factor is a hunger for human connection, and that we gravitate toward something another human being has recently posted in the hope we'll be able to get a hit of humanity through the recency of it, the same way we'd prefer a face-to-face conversation sometimes over being by ourselves with a classic book. But our phones don't actually satisfy that need for connection, or maybe it does just enough that we remain addicted to them, hoping for another morsel of authentic contact. In any case, something is off for sure! Maybe we'll go back to communities and extended families one day out of frustration!
Arman! It has been a while buddy. Great to read your writing again. Gosh, I must say, we are all stuck in this cycle of ephemeral content. Kudos to you for noticing :)