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by onion2k 2 hours ago
It’s very hard to imagine Camus pieing off fighting for the French resistance or Hemingway staying home from the Spanish Civil War because they were satiated by their Funko Pop collections.

It's a lot less hard to imagine a person with the potential to be the next Hemingway staying home because they're satiated by diving headfirst into the MCU though.

Intelligent people throwing their potential away because they've been distracted by some utterly trivial nonsense is not a new story, and it's not really anything society needs to worry about (it's their choice; society has no claim on their potential) but I reckon there's a fair few people who'll be lying on their deathbed with deep regrets about how they made becoming an expert in the canon and lore of a media franchise was a huge waste of time that only really served to funnel money to George Lucas or Marvel.

3 comments

> It's a lot less hard to imagine a person with the potential to be the next Hemingway staying home because they're satiated by diving headfirst into the MCU

I disagree - I don’t think the MCU and its ilk are satiating enough intellectually if you’re a person who has latent capability for a certain level of contribution.

You’d hope they’d intuit that they were missing something important, and discover - for example - Alan Moore, and continue from there toward slightly more nutritious content, as I suspect most people in this thread did.

But that opinion - though one I hold very strongly - is an opinion I hold because I find that it’s much more beneficial to believe that culture you do not aspire to cannot satiate you. Kind of Pascal’s Wager, but for baby movies. The placebo effect is very strong.

> lying on their deathbed with deep regrets about how they made becoming an expert in the canon and lore of a media franchise

What a heartbreaking image! You’d hope they would be thinking about - for example - their loved ones, or at least reflecting on how they had a lot of fun.

Oh but it is something society needs to worry about.

https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/hannah-arendt-making-hu...

I simply don't buy it. I'm nowhere near 'the next Hemingway', but even someone as mildly creative as myself can not possibly be satisfied with merely consuming, no matter how large the torrent of content before me. I have an overwhelming drive to create. Whether I see good content or slop, both spur me on harder to create -- good content because it inspires me, slop because it enrages me with its waste of its own potential, driving me with a sense of "I can do so much better than that". I can't imagine someone lacking that drive and yet still having the potential to achieve great creative results if only they didn't get distracted.