If you sit close enough to the front of the theater for “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, you can see Paul Mescal spit and sweat as he stalks the stage as Stanley Kowalski, an artist doing his work in real time and space. It had been a while since I’d seen live theater when I went to see “Streetcar” a few weeks ago, and I found myself in awe of the very liveness of it. I’ve grown so accustomed to experiencing culture through screens that I forgot how exciting it is to be in the room where the art is happening, to witness the effort and passion and bodily exertion that go into it.
It’s not just movies and TV, of course — we’re all aghast at how much time we spend on devices, consuming content, whatever that means. Reading and watching and posting and shopping, always shopping for things and ideas and comfort and distraction. Surely this endless marketplace will turn up something that satisfies us at some point! I complained to a friend that I had the blues recently and her advice surprised me in its specificity and simplicity: “Engage with things that someone put a lot of work into.”
This wisdom seemed to cut through a lot of the bargaining I do with myself about how I spend my time. “Well, it’s OK that I spent the last 45 minutes reading the NYCBike subreddit because I learned about how they’re ticketing cyclists who run red lights on Second Avenue, which is useful to me as someone who frequently cycles down Second Avenue,” I might rationalize. But if I am determined to engage only with things that someone put a lot of work into, idly reading Reddit is out. So is my habit of scrolling through Instagram Reels of senior dogs. No more using ChatGPT as a therapist — there isn’t even a “someone” in that equation.
I had thought my online hygiene was unimpeachable, that I’d skirted many of the mental-health hazards of social media by using it only as a source of impersonal pleasure (no looking at friends’ envy-inducing vacation photos, no posting, just the aforementioned old dogs, some fashion stuff, maybe some inspiring quotes from interviews with famous authors).
But once I started cutting stuff out and noticed my mood improving, I realized that it wasn’t the nature of the content that was making me sad, but the volume. If I sometimes feel like my hard drive is full, then it doesn’t matter if what I’m adding to the drive is, on its face, soothing. It’s just more stuff, more data, more things to process. By adopting my friend’s elevated standard for what’s allowed in, I decreased the number of inputs, the number of demands for thought and work and reaction I was requesting of my brain.
Of course, there are complications that arise with this rule. “A lot of work” is a subjective measurement, and often the things that entail a lot of work are expensive, only available to those who can afford them, which risks creating a pretty boring, exclusionary selection for cultural consumption.
I’m not interested in — nor is it a realistic proposition, given my means, tastes, profession — subsisting solely on great novels and live theater to the exclusion of all else. But any rubric that stems the tide of information we’re allowing into our brains and hearts, even temporarily, can be helpful. It helps to remember we have choices: You don’t have to check Facebook every day just because you always have. You don’t have to read that blog while you drink your coffee or watch TikToks on the toilet. If you’re experiencing a general sadness or ennui or overwhelmsion without obvious origin, why not try switching things up? It might not totally reverse your mood, but then again — who knows? — it might.
