Wilgje.net

Missing out on all the good stuff

A few weeks ago I started reading Asimov, and I found out I should have done that ages ago. The guy doesn’t just write a bit about robots, he’s a genius. However, that is precisely the problem: whenever somebody tells me some artist, book, movie, album or song is genious, that is a reason for me not to go check it out. I don’t know why I react like that, because it’s not that I don’t believe those people. For example, I’d heard about a thousand times that Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amelie Poulain is a wonderful movie, but I didn’t see it until someone really pressed me to do so. The people who told me were right, of course. Come to think of it, I reacted the same way to the funny (French) movie Taxi. Perhaps I just detest French movies.

But if I do believe the people who tell me something’s great, or at least come to the conclusion that the thing they’re advertising is worth checking out, why don’t I do that? It happens very rarely that I hear a new CD or a new artist play these days, simply because I don’t look into it anymore. I’ll try new stuff by ‘old’ bands, like Radiohead, but I haven’t heard any of the ‘newbie’ music out there today. Of all the movies I heard were great, I’ve seen maybe 10%. I didn’t even go watch most of those movies on purpose. I’ve thought up a theory of why that might be.

These days there is a whole truckload of information coming at me every day. I’m sure most people know what that feels like: you’re communicating all the time (chatting, emailing, calling, irl conversations), so naturally you have to filter some of the stuff you hear and see. My theory is, that subconsciously the mind discards that which is going to take you the most time to process. So if somebody tells me that new band out there is awesome, just discarding that saves me the trouble of having to get the album and listen to it, which would have taken time. If I did take everyone’s advice and checked out everything I heard about, I would be busy for a long time indeed.

Sometimes I create an aversion against something through the associations I make with it. For instance, if I saw a sucky movie starring Tom Cruise, I wouldn’t want to see him again even if the movie he was in was brilliant. In fact, concerning Tom Cruise… I’ve even got an aversion against movies starring him because he joined Scientology and jumped off a couch at Oprah for Katie Holmes (I mean, wtf?). The whole reasoning behind not wanting to see his movie must be that little voice going ‘you have no time for this movie’, because I’d already formed the opinion that Cruise is a good actor. But even though I loved Jerry Maguire, it’s still a fact that it would take a lot for me to go watch Valkyrie.

And that is, apparently, how my mind works. I must be missing a lot of good stuff…