Consumption Disorders

I came across someone’s big idea today on one of those posts from one of those publications. “Being a great leader…” the op-Ed journalist 5-years out of grad school wrote, “is about knowing what to say, and knowing when and how to say it!” The exclaim to which this was written, or programmed to be written, no doubt baked halfway between the rush of the deadline and application for their prospective job in tech. Maybe it was inspired while on the way to their side hustle? Who knows.

It did cause me to pause. For that I’m sure they can claim victory over my attention. For whether or not I obtained value there is a someone somewhere who did. And they, the who who wrote the authors check, did from that moment of attention and this moment of reflection surely exclaim “AHA! They consume therefore they are.”

Alas, here I are. Reflecting. Assuming there was some semblance of novel effort within the content. Wondering how this idea was peddled as new and why it needed to be explained in such simple yet immediate terms. Is this article not describing tact? Curious. But tact, too, is not my primary point.

Mine is this. In the age of acceleration, we seem to leave less room for original thought. “Regurgitation!” I exclaim in my head. But no, it’s not regurgitation if one doesn’t recognize what we are doing. We are the child who tantrums after being told the contents of the present prior to unwrapping it. Bestowing this gift on someone else provides a sense of genuine magnanimity. "We got a package. Would you like to open it, Love?" We humbly ask our partners. We fetishize the reveal.

Why is it then that we waste our lives rediscovering what has already been discovered? Because we petulantly want to find it on our own terms? What is it when we pass on a tidbit of information overheard because it sounds nice to our previously held beliefs?

'Intellectual Bulimia": an emotional disorder involving distortion of reality perception and an obsessive desire to be novel or correct, in which bouts of extreme overconsumption of media are followed by depression and self-induced panic, purging of acquaintances, or fasting from critical thought.

Maybe we need a new class of disorders for our content consumption. A consumption disorder?