Too Much to Consume, Too Little Time

In dvd vs. vhs - are there some films that just look better on video?, scott wrote:

i wanted to start a thread asking the people 20-ish and under if they ever get overwhelmed by the amount of stuff there is out there that they can consume. is it all too much. when i was a kid i would go to the library and read about movies for YEARS before i ever actually got to see them. i would think about these movies and look at every picture i could find in books. it might be 20 years in some cases until i found a copy to watch.

um, a bit off-topic.

― scott seward, Wednesday, May 26, 2010 4:25 PM

So: "overwhelmed by the amount of stuff there is out there that [you] can consume"? Do you feel overwhelmed? By what, exactly? Why? Thoughts?

(Hope it's not a big deal that I just went ahead and started this thread, but ppl, myself included, are really interested in this topic and I wanted to get the discussion off the ground.)

Credit to Mr. Scott Seward, obviously, for coming up with the idea to start this thread.

is it ok to post if you're over 20?

i can *remember* being 20, and yes, there was an overwhelming amount of stuff *and* it was harder to get

and the older you get, the more you find interesting

Yeah, I should've specified: if you're here, you're probably overwhelmed no matter what your age is, so let's all post itt. Although I guess you can specify whether you're over/under 20 if you want to.

Not enough hours in the day to consume all this stuff.

when i was a kid i would go to the library and read about movies for YEARS before i ever actually got to see them. i would think about these movies and look at every picture i could find in books. it might be 20 years in some cases until i found a copy to watch.

And music, Jesus! Like the 3rd Flying Burrito Bros. LP, to name but one of many, I have still never seen an actual copy of it but now I know what it sounds like, thx internet.

i would go to the library

Can't really put into words how important libraries were to me, as a young 'un

A constant deluge of new things to read via RSS, new books, and new music, and I never feel caught up.

I feel like the internet and ILX have exacerbated this for me. I hear about so much awesome-sounding stuff and never have the time to get round to most of it, how do people do it while maintaining a job and a life at the same time?

I'd nearly consider it a blessing that I find so much stuff uninteresting for this very reason.

I think the big problem, which is kind of obvious, is that the internet surfaces so much more information about every topic, so if you're the kind of nerd who's seriously into more than one thing and you have an impulse to get as deep into all of those subjects as you can, you're going to always feel behind because you are -- you can never "catch up." What it comes down to, then, is accepting that you'll never know everything about everything and, crucially, filtering.

See: Clay Shirky on information overload vs. filter failure (http://web2expo.blip.tv/file/1277460/) and Kathy Sierra on "The myth of 'keeping up'" (http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/04/the_myth_of_kee.html)

I'm 26, and for me "realising that I'm probably going to die" has been 100% contemporary and parallel with "basically stopping consuming books, films and music at all"? I have a sort of file of stuff marked "to get around to immediately if I ever become immortal" - pleasingly it is 100% okay for this file to grow to any finite size.

when i was a kid i would go to the library and read about movies for YEARS before i ever actually got to see them. i would think about these movies and look at every picture i could find in books.

I do miss the days of reading and re-reading 100s of multi-graf reviews of records I'd probably never hear, each compared to another 5 bands I might never hear, with puns on record titles I was unaware of = an enticing puzzle to piece together tiny corners of in spare mental moments and by serendipitous moments w/evening radio

whereas now you read the 40-word mp3 blog blurb once as you download the zip, each unheard reference point makes you think "oh crap, something else I'm obliged to spend at least an hour of my life on", and close the browser window

but, I'm old

I do miss the days of reading and re-reading 100s of multi-graf reviews of records I'd probably never hear, each compared to another 5 bands I might never hear, with puns on record titles I was unaware of

ehhh i don't

kind of amazed how much young music fans 'know' these days. the obscurest shit i used to like seems really mnstrm now, but so much just wasn't available. otoh, i listened to stuff 'more', ie more frequently

i've always felt oppressed by the amount of books i want to read but won't. at least you can basically get stuff for free now -- there are loads of canonical records i would never have paid for (because i wasn't that into what i'd heard), but am glad to be able to hear them on the internet.

Listening to a canonical novel requires slightly less effort than reading a book though.

I'm 23 - I think the idea that this could even be a problem requires a 40yo's mindset, sorta - if you grow up sitting in front of a machine that can connect you to billions of webpages and millions of people, you very quickly realize that there is an opportunity cost to your time and you're not going to see/hear/know everything - I mean, you don't even 'realize' it, it's basically inherent. whereas, I dunno, if you hung out in a small book or record store in the 70s, it would be easier to see the world in the "I'm gonna consume ALL of this" sense. for a kid in 2010, wanting to read every good book or see every good movie is the equivalent of wanting to meet every person in america - it's not an overwhelming concept, it's an absurd one.

kind of amazed how much young music fans 'know' these days

yeah - kind of amazed when teenagers are not just familiar with the hot new bands that I am too old to tell apart, and The Canon which I rejected as a teenager partly out of stroppiness and partly just to cut down on "obligations" and concentrate on the stuff I felt I could actually own and have new ideas about, but then bring up some little obscure nugget from the 90s (i.e. my own period of voracious music-houndery)

though I am pretty easily amazed by people just knowing song titles, something my memory has been no good for ever since I first had more than 20 CDs

i dont really care about knowing a lot but being alive on the internet has made me a lot less willing to read/watch/listen to stuff in isolation it always feels lonely now not to be able to talk about smthn

yeah it's weird. i know what scott means. i used to - i shit you not cuz this sounds like i'm a fuckin grandpa - but like i used to make 1 hour each way trips just to go to a town that was big enough to have rolling stone magazine and spin magazine and guitar player magazine

then in HS we used to travel the same hour cuz an "indie rock" store finally opened up....we'd take a whole day just to go buy stuff

i had this rolling stone greatest 100 albums issue and i read it over and over and over...like about marquee moon and never mind the bollocks and loaded and the first modern lovers record

i imagined them so many times.

sometimes i honestly feel like my life would be better if they shut the internet off.

I've been wondering about this for a while, usually with a feeling of 'MAN I can't even imagine what it must be like to get a grounding on so much out there if I was twenty years younger' -- but then again, it's precisely *because* I'm not twenty years younger that I'm probably thinking about it all wrong. Ultimately I don't know if there's a correct or right way to do things when the levels of expectation and accessibility have been so radically shifted, assuming one has the financial means or luck for such easy access -- still the biggest element in the room. Combine that with the motivation on what to take in or not and there are endless variables...

I thought we'd had a similar thread a while back that you'd started ned but I tried to search - man, you've made a lot of threads! ;)

Hahaha. Ten years of random thread questions as of this August!

for a kid in 2010 non-OCD person, wanting to read every good book or see every good movie is the equivalent of wanting to meet every person in america - it's not an overwhelming concept, it's an absurd one.

I go into ilx threads w/ the assumption that every person reading it is an OCD person

I can clearly recall, in about 1980, when some lackey came to my door asking if I was interested in getting me some cable tv. I said "no". She asked me why not, because she was obliged to track this information for her company. I said I was already entertained enough. This choice, sadly, was not allowed on the form she was required to fill out, so we agreed to have her fake it.

The production of more and more art, books, music, movies, television programs and consumer goods is out of my hands. I don't ask for this stuff. It just gets blurted out at a dizzying pace and there it is, bouncing around in the world, begging for attention.

The only sane response is to just live your life and not try to keep up with all of it. No one could. And far too much of it is a small variation on something that's been done a thousand times before, and often done better, too.

I feel like an old coot when I look at all the singles and eps I spent time and effort hunting down and now the kids these days can basically get whatever they want in seconds, and for free!

Music is absurdly overwhelming. I just don't have enough time to keep up with the niche genres and labels that interest me. I find music by chance these days and I'm always behind the curve. Found Best Coast and found out their singles had been blogged about for nine months already. Whoa. (this is also an effect of working away from a computer during the day - I don't have the ability to do any listening or surfing when I work)(unless I sneak away with this iPhone)

Film is less so because I realized it isn't really my medium. I can't get into movies on DVD, so my exposure to cinema is still primarily via mainstream chains and the local Angelika/Landmarks, where programming gets weaker over time.

Literature, I've always been hopeless. I don't plow through books very quickly.

Doing stuff is the hardest thing. There's not enough time in my adulthood to become proficient at the things I want to try. I want to learn to skydive, kayak, run a marathon, compete in a Strongman, etc. I end up paralyzed by choice and lack of funds/free time.

yes, doing stuff, and also going places. i get said when i think about how, realistically, i'll only get to visit a small fraction of all the places i really want to see.

I've realised I can only become 'master of my own domain'...completely on top of a passionate interest if I choose to devote my life to it. Hypothetically, I feel the only way to devote myself to literature in the way I desire is to continue on at university and do MAs/PHDs. As for music/film, I could only get a handle on *everything* if I consumed the art the way I imagine someone like Matos does; freelancing, being free to explore and broaden your interest in modes that attract and pitch articles accordingly.

I find the amount of (probably) incredible stuff out there just awe-inspiring, and I know there are so many epiphanies left to happen, from 19 years old at the the moment. It's like trying to count those white streams of light when the Millennium Falcon goes into hyperdrive. Wild.

Perhaps I could fit so much more in if I actually consumed, in all the time spent on places like here, allmusic, IMDB, the library.

Doing stuff is the hardest thing. There's not enough time in my adulthood to become proficient at the things I want to try.

Does anyone else see this zest for "doing" as an American thing? I'm not really a relaxer, I get antsy sitting down unless I'm extremely tired or I really feel like I've been productive enough to earn it. And I get up in the morning (on my days off) with a mental of list of desired achievements, and I like to get right to them.

Is this a Northern thing, and did Southerners of both USA and Eur learn to slow down b/c of their weather? Is it a part of the American optimist/Puritan/Calvinist legacy? Am I just mental?

xp Eh, I feel like I have fewer epiphanies from art as I get older. There's still stuff I really like, but nothing gobsmacks me like it used to.

xpost lol way to curb my enthusaiasm!

I don't miss driving hours to find a record store that might possibly have a copy of something I had read about a bunch in some book I checked out from the library. doing that shit was a pain in the ass.

or wishing I knew someone else that had heard of Can, or Funkadelic

or having to wait years and years to even hear what "One Nation Under A Groove" sounded like, or to find a copy of Spacemen 3's "Taking Drugs to Make Music To", or having to rely on write-ups in Spin and Rolling Stone to even piece together what an artist's catalog was like.

fuckin lame.

i read this book recently and its a bit dated and probably out of print but it had some good stuff in it. about americans and their inability to ever be sated. how we have to keep moving and consuming cuz, duh, that is how our country was set up. its in our blood.

http://www.redskybooks.net/redsky/images/items/200x1000/025827.jpg

x-post somewhere up there...

xp to Laurel- I don't think it's limited regionally in the US, or necessarily to the US. After all, the south is the home of Git R Done and the bored 4 hours of TV a night middle-class is nationwide.

Recent argument with gf was about my need to do stuff. I felt like she wouldn't give me leads on things she wanted to do together (go see this museum or that game or whatever) and she said she was happy just sitting on the couch watching a DVD with me. I had to explain that I'm usually not. Cuddling with TV should be a change of pace to me, not the standard plan for Saturday afternoon. I've only got 12 years 'til 40, I want to make the most of (probable) good health and physical ability.

I'm not an ambitious person in the traditional American sense, but I'm starting to feel like a sense of drive (the need to just be doing something, even if it's an active waste of time) will always be an obstacle for us.

I see Shakey's point about isolation - my era of teendom/young adulthood was lucky. We had the Internet to learn about stuff and communicate, but still had the opportunity to hit the cool record stores to try to find stuff. And when I didn't find X, I might chance upon Y instead.

I'm into doing stuff! Making music and being outside = best use of my spare time. TV's mostly garbage anyway, usually only in front of it for an hour or so a day

oddly an hour was the limit my parents set on my TV viewing as a child lol

milo, you're speaking my language. I think I'm driving the partner crazy because I can't zone out for a whole day, and frankly I don't see why I SHOULD zone out for a whole day, apart from the occasional massive hangover or whatever. Feels like a criminal waste of time that I could be fixing or making or learning something. Have slowed myself way WAY down these past months and it's really showing in my interest in life.

but yeah growing up in the 'burbs pre-internet was PAINFUL. there was lots of stuff I was interested in that literally nobody I knew had ever even heard of, much less been curious about. (lone exception being my brother, but he was in the same boat I was for the most part). It was near impossible to find things, to find people to share them with, and to learn about them - sure the chase was fun on some level, and anticipation always makes the reward that much sweeter, but in general ugh I would've survived my prison sentence in rightwing suburban hellhole a lot better if I had had access to all the subcultural/underground stuff that I desperately wanted to connect with.

x-post

Also if I get bored and unmotivated I will basically just read until I fall asleep so now he's mad that I sleep too much. I mean this is not going to work like this.

Is yr gf actively resentful of your other time commitments?

I thank god for internet radio. If you find a good dj or five, you don't have to spend as much time "auditioning" mp3s. The problem is that I don't make enough time for radio.

i know this kind of betrays my west coach beach kid roots, but is anyone itt okay with just getting around to te things you end up getting around to? you certainly won't get to everything, but if you've got a good enough perpheral sense for things happening around you, you'll probably find more than enough of interest, offline or on.

oh definitely. I'm never going to digitize all my LPs before I die, or hear everything I want to.

as far as keeping up I am pretty happy with where I am, and glad that I can keep up better than the pre-internet days (although back then it helped that I was an avid tape trader, which performed a lot of the pre-internet try-before-you-buy function and should be noted here). I have more than I can listen to now, but the point is to be able to listen to whatever strikes your mood, not to plow through everything like a chore. Some records (or MP3 zips) sit around for years until the right moment comes.

that's how I feel for the most part. I've often been behind the curve on various things, but keeping up with the zeitgeist or whatever just seems silly. at this point I know what I like and have a fair grasp of what's still out there so I'm not in any hurry

but is anyone itt okay with just getting around to te things you end up getting around to?

just sayin, with a somewhat curious mind and awareness of the culture, you'll find plenty to get into w/o ocd torrenting 15 chillwave (or whatever, sorry chillwave strawman) recs a day. worrying about not getting around to ALL of it seems foreign to me. the idea of actually needing to just strikes me as gross.

i am increasingly ok with just doing what i can get done because stressing about stuff to do makes me do less

To use music as an example: There's a useful, albeit somewhat arbitrary, distinction to be made between people who like to seek out music just to have some new tunes to listen to and music nerds who listen to as much music as possible. It's clear what the former are doing. The latter, however, are doing one or more of the following, depending: (1) feeding an insatiable desire to hear as much new music as possible; (b) accumulating knowledge about the current state of whatever genre(s) they're interested in; and (c) keeping up with a peer ground in order to "be a part of the conversation" or to just not be left behind. This is just a sketch of some stuff I think is going on and it could be fleshed out more, but there you go.

http://www.thestripcult.com/Join_files/shapeimage_1.png

I'm 33, and at the moment I'm getting much more out of repeated consumption of the mainstream grown-up canon - Shakespeare, Dylan, Prince, Scorsese, learning classical guitar pieces - than obsessively hunting and sampling more and more new stuff. Part of it, I think, is that we had kids relatively early - my eldest is nearly 12 - and a fair bit of new stuff (music in particular) feels like it belongs to their generation rather than mine.

i just don't get that. music doesn't belong to anybody.

it's not hard to keep up with what one is interested in. if you're wigged out about being "in touch" and "on top"... don't worry about it.

That's fine if your interests are narrow. If you think everything is potentially interesting, then you don't have enough time on this planet to check it all out, much less have any kind of deeper relationship with it.

xp re music doesn't belong to anybody - jeez getting on to questionable ground here, but I disagree, most (all?) music is culturally and temporally situated.

I mean, I can appreciate Miley Cyrus to some extent - she can sing and there are some half-decent tunes - but no matter how open I am, I'd never have the same OMG!♥♥♥♥! reaction that my daughters do. resonance, marketing, whatever - it's their music

yeah, that makes sense, but you're still allowed to cross the barricades if you wanna. like, am i supposed to listen only to music made by 40-something str8 wite guys?

it's the desperation that i don't understand. there is so much music available for anyone to check out, regardless of genre. it's all so accessible.. complaining about "keeping up" seems to be related more to some whole "being on top"/"knowing the best of the best" mentality. i understand wanting to hear all the newest freshest stuff, but it isn't as if the volume of brilliant music has increased this decade to the point where it's unmanageable to keep track of. anyway, i still think markers/ksh is a troll/sock so why the hell am i responding? oh yeah, that bottle o gin :/

xp re music doesn't belong to anybody - jeez getting on to questionable ground here, but I disagree, most (all?) music is culturally and temporally situated

lol wut

man, turns out that d'angelo record is really good

it isn't as if the volume of brilliant music has increased this decade to the point where it's unmanageable to keep track of.

fucking hell, yes it has. or at least, potentially brilliant music that you'd need to check out at least once to know if it were brilliant or not. do you have more hours in a day than anyone else here?

INTERNET

FREE ONLINE MAGAZINES

more like one's ability to hear about and get exposure to all the potentially brilliant shit that's ALWAYS been out there has suddenly increased 1000fold. e.g. d'angelo, for instance, not that i'm saying

Much as i like to think I'm on level pegging with floyd appreciation as my dad, whenever i see old photos of him and his hippy floyd dudes in the 70's i can't help think he has one up on me.

IF IT'S ALWAYS BEEN OUT THERE

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM

THE CAPS IS OUT THERE

i mean, sound clips at music store websites, that's pretty much all i need when it comes to seeking out new music.

eat my caps

Hobbes, can you recommend any of these FREE ONLINE MAGAZINES for me?

erh sorry tomofthenest that was a INTERNET = FREE ONLINE MAGAZINES that got truncated.

VIBE

oh I know really, was just being disingenuous in a half-hearted attempt to zing hobbes.

hobbes kinda otm tbh

mainly this

there is so much music available for anyone to check out, regardless of genre. it's all so accessible.. complaining about "keeping up" seems to be related more to some whole "being on top"/"knowing the best of the best" mentality. i understand wanting to hear all the newest freshest stuff, but it isn't as if the volume of brilliant music has increased this decade to the point where it's unmanageable to keep track of.

Searching numerous different sites and magazines on the internet to try and stay on top of things just seems to me like making unnecessary work for yourself. I think I probably get the majority of my music news from ILX. If something if really exceptional and worth hearing I have no doubt that somebody else will discover it and repost it here.

Also if I don't know that I'm missing something, I can't spend time thinking that I might want to try and find out more about it.

It's amazing how easily you can absorb a lot of things now by cultural osmosis.

yeah, you guys are probably right -- it is kinda a self-created problem. expertise in a bunch of fields is probably impossible right now. but it's hard to even feel competent in one thing when there's always someone else out there who put more time into that thing than you have and can understand/explain things better than you can. not that this is a contest, but if you even want to have a seat at the table for a critical discussion of something with other really knowledgeable people, you at least need to know what you're talking about

which seems to take increasingly more time/effort to be able to do, because there's more stuff in one single domain, like indie rock, than there's ever been before to know about, and to have a real solid grasp of what's going on you need to have some sort of an understanding of all of that **more**

Markers, do you aspire to be a music writer?

if you're not concerned with really getting some sort of expertise or deep knowledge of a bunch of subjects though, then the problem I'm describing doesn't really exist for you. if you're just pursuing your own idiosyncratic interests and not pursuing expertise, then you're probably fine and, yeah, feeling pretty good, because as people have said itt there's so much great stuff coming out all the time. you can kind of get more than you need easily. which really is fantastic

xpost

at one time I thought I might want to be a music writer, but I'm increasingly less sure. probably not. but there are a bunch of subjects, music included, that I want to at least be knowledgeable enough about that I can talk intelligently about them

You already know enough to talk intelligently. Researching more trivia is just going to add noise to the signal.

http://thecprogrammer.com/wp-content/woo_custom/29-blog-tour-overload.gif

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/04/twitters-big-challenge-too-much-twitter/

also, if you have anything to contribute to this thread that has nothing to do with this article, please do

I just consumed too much by wasting my time to skim that article.

'Too much to consume...too little time' ... this only became true for me when I realized how easy it is to get pretty much anything in digital format for free on the internet and promptly took advantage of the fact. These days I am restricting myself to media I actually pay for, which cuts down significantly on the supply aspect.

That's got an element of otm about it, i've been trying to make time to actually watch all the movies/boxsets i've been storing up. Reading, i've just given up on tbh

In the last few years I've felt a sense of diminishing returns with new music and films, like there's more of it available to me than ever, but most of it is more likely to seem familiar, to not set off any new bells and whistles in my head, etc.

I think we had a p good thread about that, discussing the merits of the new vs that which has been idk time-filtered for quality- 'if you had the choice btwn no new music or no old music t/s' kind of thing

too many movies to watch, articles to read, books to skim, albums to hear, games to play...

I think we had a p good thread about that, discussing the merits of the new vs that which has been idk time-filtered for quality- 'if you had the choice btwn no new music or no old music t/s' kind of thing

― privilege as 'me me me' (darraghmac), Friday, April 12, 2013 10:40 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, there's that, but even with older music, I feel like I'm running out of frontiers.

haz you tried opera, pre-war country music, or getting deep into schlager?

1) yeah and I don't like it
2) yeah
3) ?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=schlager

tbh i feel this way with books more and more.
i want to read ~everything~ all at once.

Too often I find myself reading a book and enjoying it but I still feel like I'm always in a hurry to finish it and get to the next one rather than fully appreciating what I am reading right now.

I spend too much time checking how many pages I still have to read / how much time is left in the movie / how many years I still have to live

haz you tried opera, pre-war country music, or getting deep into schlager?

this thread was mentioned on 77 (don't hit me with a 60). it's still relevant to me right now.