Here's the scene: you're sitting on your couch scrolling through that endless labyrinth, Netflix. You've been here before. The cursor flickers and you’re in a trance, jumping from title to title, but you feel overwhelmed.
Welcome to the glut. The buffet's endless, but everything’s starting to taste the same. How could that be? There’s plenty of diversity:
A dystopian sci-fi drama with a female lead, Caitlyn Jenner, discovering her powers and her sexual identity.
A stand-up special from the comic Andrew Dice Clay, who makes observations about fast food drive-thrus and dirty bathrooms in ball parks.
A world where giant, sentient slugs control the government, and only a human janitor has the ability to communicate with his slimy overlords.
Cooking in the Afterlife. A skeleton chef, Paul Lynde, who is cursed to cook in purgatory forever, hosts a show where the ingredients are the souls of the recently deceased. Each episode features bizarre challenges like making a soufflé with the essence of regret.
Vending Machine World. In a city where everyone is a sentient vending machine, a jukebox detective, played by Pete Davidson, searches for his missing coin. The case leads him through a gritty underworld of soda dispensers and snack robots, complete with musical numbers about unrequited love and faulty mechanisms.
Suddenly, choosing something to watch is like staring into the abyss, except the abyss has a remote control, and it's laughing at you.
Streaming platforms are all about instant gratification. Netflix churns out new shows faster than you can hit “skip intro.” Amazon Prime tosses billion-dollar series around like Halloween candy. Disney+? They’re already planning a gritty Bambi reboot.
The issue isn’t finding something to watch — it’s the overwhelming anxiety of choosing what to watch. There’s always something new, so much so that by the time you mention what’s trending, it already feels outdated.
And there’s User-Generated Content, the democratized Wild West.
TikTok, the digital fever dream where 15-second bursts of people dancing to viral songs or explaining complex political theories at warp speed blur together in a pixelated rave.
YouTube, once the home of cat videos and skateboarding fails, is now bursting at the seams with vlogs, DIY tutorials, conspiracy theories, and reaction videos to reaction videos. It's chaos, pure and simple, but that's the point. No one's out here gatekeeping. Grab your phone, point, shoot, upload. It doesn’t matter if you’re not Spielberg, you're already competing with the guy who's uploading his daily routine of cooking microwave ramen.
Your smartphone has more computing power than the ship that landed men on the moon and now it’s helping your neighbor livestream his attempt to eat one hundred spicy chicken nuggets. He’s looking for sponsorship. Paging Peptol Bismol.
We’ve entered a world where anyone with smartphone and basic editing skills can claim their five minutes of fame. And let’s not forget podcasts — there are podcasts for everything. True crime, knitting, the history of left-handed Vikings, you name it, someone’s talking into a mic about it. It is estimated there are over one million podcasts currently online.
Real weirdos are also present in this landscape, they are the Niche Markets. Ever feel like Hollywood doesn’t “get” your deep love for early 2000s French techno? There's a YouTube channel for that. Think mainstream media is ignoring the intricacies of competitive ferret racing? Don’t worry, a subreddit’s got you covered. In the glut, every tribe, no matter how small, has their content fix. This is how you end up with Twitch streams dedicated entirely to watching people organize their sock drawers. Seriously, it’s a thing.
Today, we also have the Globalization of Content. Gone are the days when a show only mattered if it premiered on a big American network. South Korean dramas, Nigerian Nollywood flicks, and Argentine telenovelas are now just a click away. Squid Game wasn’t just a hit in Seoul; it became a worldwide phenomenon that left everyone wondering if they should have learned Korean in high school and added kimchi to their diets. Thanks to platforms like Netflix, you're now diving headfirst into the cultural zeitgeist of places you've never been, absorbing stories from across the globe in one big binge.
But with all this comes the problem — decision fatigue. The glut turns your brain into mush. It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet after a three-day fast: you're paralyzed by options. Is it even possible to enjoy any of it when you're constantly worried about what you might be missing out on?
Enter content curation, where algorithms decide what you'll consume, filtering out the noise, so you don’t have to. YouTube’s “suggested videos,” Spotify’s “Discover Weekly,” Netflix’s “because you watched” section — they’re all designed to herd you into the corner of the pen where the algorithms think you'll be happiest, so you won’t leave the site. That way, you can be served more ads.
It’s all one big digital maze, a content explosion that never stops detonating. But as the dust settles, and the next new thing flashes on your screen, you start to wonder: are you watching it because you want to? Or because it’s the least awful choice out of a thousand options?
The glut isn't going anywhere. Buckle up, tune in, and prepare to doom scroll endlessly into oblivion.
I'm trying to simplify my life. My sister and a distant friend know much about genealogy, and I don't care about it. I'm not related by blood to the jazz heroes (and some of the bit players too), but they all turn me on. There's only so much I can be hip to. Thanks for this essay and all your stories of jazz gems.
And this all comes to me at a time when any sense of "substantial" personal identity has been lost or taken from me, leaving me Oh So desperate, and open to "possibilities", of which there are, apparently, infinities