TV, Books or Music?
Sometimes I play a game. Would I rather have the TV or books? Books or music? I cycle through the three options, challenging no one but myself. I won’t be held to this answer but I always like to bend my brain like this. I always think music wins. It makes me feel the most but so often music is something I listen to whilst doing something else. Only in extreme circumstances do I do nothing but listen to music. I lie on the floor. Hoping I can feel the music through the floorboards.
Sometimes I skip through playlists to the point of hearing nothing. The soundtrack is not the algorithm curated soundscape but simply nanoseconds of the songs as I try to settle on something that captures my mood but it doesn’t happen quick enough and I get impatient.
Similarly, to when I don’t know what I feel like watching on TV so I end up watching nothing, just the beginning of Gilmore Girl episodes, a few minutes of Brooklyn 99 and a strained viewing of Peaky Blinders. I am desperate to feel comfy, to laugh, to get caught up in a storyline that means I don’t look at my phone and/or daydream of what else I could be watching.
The inability to settle in for fear of missing out or feeling like you need to hurry up so you can get through everything else on your ‘list’ (on Just Watch, Netflix, the notes app on your phone) is surely a feeling that needs a single German or Japanese word to capture it. Like the one that refers to buying loads of books but never reading them. Speaking of which, yesterday I bought six. I intend to read all of them but my dedication to them is less. I don’t relish them, and if they aren’t capturing my attention as soon as, then I move on. Discarding them as if they are a magazine, I picked up in the doctor’s waiting room. Distracted.
We are very spoilt. We have a lot we can choose from. I don’t wish to return to a previous era where the commercial channels dictated our viewing. I do wish to create habits that are more deliberate. That mean I don’t buy another book until I read what I have. And maybe finish one TV series before I move on to the next. But then, I realise we are multifaceted people and I need a lot of media to satisfy each part of myself. Just like some people are happy to wear the same thing every day, I am not. Even if it does inspire genius aka Steve Jobs.
I can be a comatose zombie. I switch between my little screen to my bigger screen to my biggest screen. I hit pause on shows that are over 45 minutes long so I can have an intermission in which to click aimlessly on my phone to see what I have missed (nothing) or cram in a few more pages of the book I have wedges between the arm of the couch and the cushion. Sometimes, I rush around brushing my teeth and getting clothes ready for the morning so there is maximum reading time the minute I go to bed, and then again in the morning when I sit down for breakfast.
This is when the power switches. Sometimes media fills the time in between work; music plays while I am working. I lazily check social media and flick between work emails and my personal inbox to read the latest newsletters. Other times, everything happening in the offline or the off-media world seems like the grout between the tiles. My mind is focused solely on the story I am reading and it is the lens which I view everything. I somehow get to work, too busy scream-singing songs in the car and in conversation I have to be careful to not simply refer to a YouTuber whose videos I watch as soon as they come out, because, as I tell myself, I don’t actually know these people so shouldn’t include their anecdotes in my every day.
I switch between these two phases without realising. We all straddle them both. Switching between them is quick but tiring, like the extra juice your brain uses when multi-tasking. I am absorbed by a series and then spit out at the end. Reeling. I spend entire afternoons reading books because I feel like I need to finish before I can return to normal life.
So back to my original game: books, music or TV. I’ll take all of them, on a very uneven whim of rotation.