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Comment by acuozzo | Hacker News Reader

> I barely consume media nowadays, because every book, movie, TV show, video game and song fails to give me an interesting or meaningful experience.

I felt this way too until I realized that what I was really experiencing was that my desire to explore outside of my comfort zone had lessened with age.

Have you jumped into silent films? Buster Keaton?

Have you explored European Atmospheric Cinema? Jean-Luc Godard?

Art House? Non-Kurosawa Japanese films? Pre-Bollywood Indian films?

In the past, when confronted with questions like that, I would reply with a statement akin to: "Yeah, but that's not what interests me!"

And the lesson I needed to learn about myself was contained within those— my own —words.

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Thank you for this advice. Upon some self-reflection, I think I realize now that I've fallen into this exact trap. The few movies I've recently watched have been the kind of formulaic drivel that I know I'm sick of, and yet I've never felt any desire to watch genres I'm not already familiar with.

I seem to get some perverse kind of satisfaction from reinforcing my nihilistic view of the current state of things while doing absolutely nothing to challenge or improve that perception - and all the while I'm longing for some nostalgic idea of the past.

I've examined similar feelings very closely and don't believe it to be a past centric nostalgia. I've found niches that give me that same energy. Most of what I enjoy lies outside of what's recommended to me by most front page/news feed algorithms/is stuff I find as a consequence of deliberate search/spelunking for different novel ideas.

I genuinely believe true creativity taps into something beyond our conscious experience, and is a kind of strange combination between premonition and expression of the collective unconscious. I think our systems and machine centric world is delusional about the ability to statistically predict how to deliver what people actually want/need, and those systems are unable to replicate extremely important hidden benefits of human curation. We've created systems that seem to be able to meet our needs "automatically", but they don't actually meet our needs/they're too self referential and too reliant on explicit metrics. Those systems have taken over most of the more natural avenues for discovery and end up over-selecting for things that are the average of existing material, and have little creative authenticity. AI recommended and generated movies/art is the final boss of this trend.

That trap is a consequence of the dopaminergic treadmills most of us are stuck on courtesy of recommendation algorithms optimizing purely for attention.

> I seem to get some perverse kind of satisfaction from reinforcing my nihilistic view of the current state of things

Oh, you're going to love Béla Tarr, maybe start there.

It’s a bit fiendish to nudge an unsuspecting victim towards Satantango like that :P

Part of this phenomenon is that the traditional "curators" of art are not really doing their jobs as stewards of the art. They are just extracting money. You used to be able to find cinemas that showed art house films in places other than the center of big cities (where they are struggling to stay open), but now it's all Marvel movies and whatever new samey rom-com just came out. That leads people to not even start down the path of discovery to find what they really like.

The age of curation and stewarding is gone. You can find all sorts of new, boundary-pushing art online, but there's no money or respect in curation anymore. Media is being created faster than any curator can keep up and the market is so wide that it's easier for individuals to just ask friends instead of seeking a trusted curator.

Some things I found to be 'new'...

Harold Lloyd Safety Last is a comedy silent film that I sat with 2000 other people to watch about a decade ago. There was an orchestra in the pit playing the music that was composed for the film. Talk about laughing until you cried. Magic evening.

Nitin Sawhney has written and performed new music for silent movies from India and Japan. Again performed to full concert halls producing quite a novel experience. A throw of the dice was quite something.

Philip Jeck and Gavin Bryars' The Sinking of the Titanic played with a small 1917 style dance band. Projected visuals cut from contemporary newsreel film of huge ocean liners and crowds playing against Jeck's turntable based improvisations. A magic and elegiac evening.

The common thread for me is performance I think.

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