Stop watching the gray mass. Turn off the reboot. Read a book. Watch a foreign film. Listen to a podcast about something you don’t understand. Demand better. And when you find something brilliant, scream about it from the rooftops.
Conversely, low-quality popular media—the fourth reboot of a reality competition, the fifteenth Marvel sequel, the procedurally generated Netflix thriller—encourages passive scrolling. It trains the brain to expect instant resolution, simplistic good-vs-evil dichotomies, and dopamine hits every 90 seconds. Over time, this erodes attention spans and reduces our tolerance for the nuanced, slow-burn problems of real life. czechstreetse138part1hornypeteacherxxx1 better
TikTok and YouTube have actually helped, not hindered, quality. Creators on Nebula, Dropout, and independent YouTube channels are producing documentary and comedy content that far surpasses network television in rigor and wit. People are willing to pay for smart short-form content. Stop watching the gray mass
It sounds absurd, but this is how much of modern media is greenlit. Characters become archetypes. Plot twists become predictable. Dialogue becomes a functional conveyor belt to move from one expensive CGI set piece to the next. When content is produced by committee and validated by spreadsheets, it ceases to be art. It becomes a product. And products are designed to be consumed and forgotten, not cherished and remembered. The call for better entertainment content and popular media is not elitist snobbery. It is a mental health imperative. Watch a foreign film
Frustrated with big-budget sludge, services like A24’s partnership with Showtime, Neon, and MUBI have proven that weird, arthouse cinema can find massive audiences. Everything Everywhere All at Once won Best Picture not because it was safe, but because it was wildly, riskily original.
We are entering the . Whether it is a newsletter, a YouTube channel, a podcast, or a friend group, the most valuable asset in 2026 will not be production value—it will be taste. The ability to sift through 10,000 terrible shows and recommend the single brilliant one is a superpower.
