Looking Back at Looking Forward

Remember appointment culture? Appointment television, appointment movies, album release dates. People actually marked their calendars around media and entertainment. I know there are still plenty of sports fans who do exactly that. The schedule is the schedule. Outside of sports, though, entertainment doesn’t seem to organize our calendars in quite the same way anymore.

Those of a certain age probably remember walking into the video store or record shop and suddenly whatever you were looking for just flew out of your head. Now it’s like that with everything. These days, we’re bombarded across social media, podcasts, newsletters, streaming services, and every other conceivable channel. We live in an era of information saturation, where option paralysis has become the everyday reality.

Many of us are understandably looking for respite from the news cycle. This has been an annus horribilis by almost any measure. Large parts of America are on fire, or breathing smoke from fires in Canada. The war in the Middle East continues to metastasize. Rising food prices, energy costs, and everything else are squeezing people from all directions. Who could blame anyone for wanting a distraction?

The hard part is deciding which distraction when the noise-to-signal ratio is so high. Once, there were just a handful of ways to find out about something: television, radio, the newspaper, and your friends. Now everything is vying for our attention all at once. It’s infinite needles in an ever-expanding haystack. Things can still become huge, but they’re mostly meganiches, invisible to anyone outside them.

And yet cultural touchstones are still possible. I was actually kind of shocked that The Odyssey packed theaters. I’m not the biggest Christopher Nolan fan, and I wasn’t sure a long adaptation of Homer would become much of a cultural event. People showed up anyway, which is encouraging. At long last, CGI superhero movies aren’t the guaranteed draw they once were. But audiences still seem willing to turn out for Big Movies built around recognizably human experiences. That’s pretty cool.

All of this came to mind because I was trying to think of upcoming things I was excited about for a Friday post and had to ponder a lot harder than I expected. That’s not to say there aren’t any. I’ve got a few concerts coming up in August. The third Dune comes out in December. (Timothée Chalamet is so not my Paul Atreides, but I’m a Dune guy, so in for a penny, I suppose.) My new book, Dead Dharma, comes out on November 5, which will probably force me to put a few things on the calendar. Robert Eggers’ Werewulf arrives in theaters this Christmas. I’m sure I’m forgetting some stuff, because old.

It’s kind of nice not being on the cutting edge of anything. There’s a freedom in not needing to know what’s trending. Then again, I also think it’s become almost impossible to know what’s going on in any meaningful sense. There are simply too many movies, television shows, albums, podcasts, livestreams, newsletters, and recommendations. Nobody can keep up with “content” anymore, so maybe we can let go of that particular pressure.

These days, my appointments tend to be things like going to the pool with my daughter before summer ends, talking with my wife after work, writing, playing music, or simply having an afternoon where I don’t have to be anywhere in particular.

I don’t really need a calendar for those. That’s fine by me.

But I am curious: What are you actually looking forward to? Is there something on the calendar that you’re genuinely excited about?