You can save yourself an enormous amount of time by learning to predict the whole contents of a movie, book, video, etc. based entirely on the premise. Once you have this ability, you no longer need to spend time consuming those products: you already know exactly what they’ll contain. You can still consume them as a way to kill time, but only if you want to.
For example, take The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, or The Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert. People are always linking me to clips from these shows, and I used to consider myself a fan, but nowadays I don’t follow those links unless I’m bored or there’s some compelling reason. Why? Because they haven’t changed in years, and I can almost always predict their punchlines in advance (or if not the exact punchline, the overall idea). This isn’t to say the shows are bad at comedy. They’re still quite funny! But I don’t need to view them. Even if it were imperative that I maintain a solid grasp on those shows (e.g., if I hang out with a lot of young white people), I still would not need to view individual clips.
Again, there are some bloggers whose every scribbling I used to devour, but nowadays I rapidly skim their posts or skip them entirely. Based on nothing but the post title, I can pretty reliably predict what they’re gonna say. In fact, I’ll go further than that: given just the title, if I were forced to, I could write an appropriate article myself. And I must emphasize, I’m still talking about some top-notch bloggers here. It’s just that I’ve reached a point where generic articles no longer offer anything unpredictable. To grow, we must expose ourselves to radically new material.
“The Onion” is another great example. It’s quite fun to browse The Onion just looking at headlines. Once you’ve read a few stories (or maybe even before you’ve read a few stories) you can begin absorbing all the humor through the headlines alone, no longer needing to actually open them and read the full articles. I was an Onion reader way back in the early days, before they became bajillionaires (yeah, yeah, call me a hipster). Back then, most the headlines weren’t even clickable. They didn’t even bother writing stories for them, but those headlines were still the best part of the site.
Any content whose cornerstone is parody, satire, or sarcasm, is bound to become predictable fast (unless it’s of the finest subtlety). My deepest respect goes out to writers who keep on reinventing themselves and reinventing themselves, writing from way out of left field, keeping me on the tips of my toes. And to writers whose work is stuffed full of solid content, whether it be mathematical theorems or cocktail recipes. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from all my blogging, it’s a deep appreciation for all things unpredictable.
FURTHER READING
Blogging vs. Academic Writing
Fun with Pop-Evolutionary Biology
Incentives for Creativity