Beauty In, Beauty Out
Does consciousness of the media we consume contribute to the quality of the media we make?
There’s this fear of mine that has become more prominent in recent years regarding my potential for child-rearing. Will I become one of those parents who has to endure ad nauseam the saccharine, mind-numbing genre that is children’s music? My god, what’s going to happen to my Spotify Wrapped? Will I just become a shell of myself, my vinyl collection gathering dust, the great concerts of days past a distant memory? I expressed these fears to a friend recently, someone who has a strong sense of music taste on her own, and she assured me it doesn’t have to be the case. She said occasionally she plays it for her kids. “It’s like candy,” she said. It’s easy, quick, built to satisfy. But more often than not, she’s playing music that she also enjoys and shares it with them. I found it deeply reassuring.
Since that conversation I’ve revisited this sense of “it’s like candy” quite a bit. I think there’s a lot of “candy” around us, enticing us to take a bite, like Snickers curing any sense of hangriness in a matter of seconds. There are many categories the “candy” idea can apply to. It’s the bops playing on the pharmacy speakers, the flashy CGI of the latest action movie, your typical “beach read” or latest Real Housewives. Instagram and TikTok are built on this idea - quick, flashy content that is just enough to grab your attention and keep you scrolling to the next one. Sure, it can be a nice little dose of serotonin, something easy to enjoy in the midst of our mundane lives, but should we be moderating how much of this “candy” we’re ingesting? Are we bound to get a psychological “cavity” if we have too much? What happens to our output? If we want to make something great, do something great with our lives, how does the content we’re ingesting make an impact? Maybe, if “garbage in, garbage out” is true, then it must also be true for “beauty in, beauty out”, right? What if instead of avoiding candy altogether, we find a balance, seek out beautiful things that are even more satisfying and inspiring? Maybe then we’d find that the “candy” isn’t so appetizing anymore compared to true and beautiful things.
At least once a year I go through a wave during which I delete every social media app from my phone and place a book of poetry or something else on my nightstand, hoping I’ll read that instead when I turn off my alarm in the morning. Maybe I focus more on the NYTimes daily puzzles in an attempt to kill less brain cells, but in the end, I keep coming back to the scrolling. I envy when I hear celebrities say they use flip phones or don’t have an Instagram account. To me, it takes a certain bit of wealth and notoriety to be able to find success outside of these channels. It leaves me wondering, for a plebeian like myself, where to draw the line? There’s this desire to participate in popular culture, connect with my friends, and find interesting content that social media provides, but then I find myself already dissatisfied with my life, wishing I was in Japan or Italy within 15 minutes of waking up.
Monitoring my own intake of media isn’t new. It almost feels like something I’ve been working on my entire life. Perhaps the first instance was when I expressed my distaste for Britney Spears’ “Hit Me Baby (One More Time)” when I was roughly 6 years old. This is not to say I had great musical taste at the time. I was at the same moment choosing Backstreet Boys over NSYNC, and we know which artists’ music has aged the best out of all these (ahem, Britney). This sentiment most certainly did not give me any cool points among the other girls at summer camp, but it was the beginning of a long life of critiquing the art around me.
I’m all too familiar with the sense of bringing down a conversation when I have no choice but to honestly admit I don’t like whatever artist it is we’re discussing. But when I look back on the media I’ve given most of my time to, I know I did so because it was actually speaking to me in some way. I’m driven by this innate hope that maybe if I ensure I’m ingesting beautiful things then one day I, too, could make something beautiful. So here I am, having spent a lifetime evaluating and adding to my collection of beautiful things, hoping I can weave together something spectacular.
What I’m loving this week:
Eat: If you’re local to Asheville (or in the area any time soon) the chicken sandwich from Sand Hill Kitchen slaps hard.
Drink: Brooklyn Brewery’s Special Effects NA IPA might be the best NA IPA I’ve had recently. So flavorful and no booze!
Watch: The new season of Loki has me captivated. As someone who hasn’t been the biggest fan of Marvel in the past, this show continues to impress me with its intricacies and comedic moments.
Listen: My friend Amy Jay’s new song What Do I Know is gorgeous and I think compliments many of the themes I tend to mention in this Substack.
Read: As I’ve been overwhelmed by content and much of what I believe to be misinformation on social media re: Israel and Gaza, I appreciated this article in the New Yorker print this week. I’m sure it’s far from perfect and the writer himself calls that out in the first line, but it was a helpful read for me.
Love this!!!!