maybe video is not so good for you
an honest reflection on our drug of choice
Welcome to The Mind of Murphy, my digital garden for planting new ideas—and possibly also mental illness.
The most dominant form of entertainment today is video. Not just the short form brain rot everyone loves complaining about, but also YouTube videos, Netflix specials, biopics, movies, and so on.
Like most people, I grew up loving video. It was the thing that I wanted to do with my life. Two decades later, and I’m starting to have second thoughts.
The Myth of the Wagnerian Masterpiece
Richard Wagner was a German playwright who was undoubtedly one of the most powerful creative forces of his day. He wasn’t just a playwright though, he dabbled across basically every creative art form. Gesamtkunstwerk he called it—the coming together of every great artistic form: music, mythology, performance, poetry, costumes, architecture, and more.
The first time I heard about the idea, I immediately made the connection to video. Video is arguably an even better medium than the theater stage because there’s also post production editing, which is an additional art form unto itself.
The creative lineage fueled a journey that went nowhere. And after wasting most of my life not just chasing video but mythologizing it, I’ve discovered a dark truth:
Video might not be so good.
Are there any true Wagnerian masterpieces our culture has produced? A true creative explosion? Coming together of all creative forms to not just push the boundaries of what is possible on the screen, but possible in our imaginations?
I’m not so sure.
And even if such a thing were possible, we seem to have created financial and cultural circumstances as to make their actualization an impossibility.
I won’t do the whole capitalism is behind this rant because I’m sure you understand it intuitively: in order for a video to be profitable, it must appeal to a wide audience, and must therefore lack nuance that could be alienating to said audience.
Even the most thoughtful and talented video creator is still dependent on the dazzle. The speed. The spectacle. It’s like covering a healthy meal in a coat of sugar. Yeah, you’ll still get the nutritional benefits of eating the meal, but that’s probably a little too much sugar for someone to have in one sitting.
But more often than not, we don’t have those thoughtful artisans creating video, you get a captain steering a ship, or worse, cynical shortcuts.
On Creative Decision-Making
Creativity is just decision-making
What colors to use. What to say and how to say it. How long to linger on a single shot and how to use music to emphasize emotion.
But when it comes to video, there is such a vast multitude of decisions that need to be made that it becomes overwhelming, even for simple concepts. If you’ve never done video yourself, you would be amazed at how complicated even the simple stuff becomes.
Yes, it means video presents a significantly wider range of possibility, but I think it is that wide range of possibility that is just too much for the human mind. Which is why individuals cannot make movies, they need production studios, and entire teams of animators and actors and people who specialize in just a single component to video.
Sadly, I don’t think it’s possible to be a true artisan of the craft because there are simply too many decisions, too many skills, too much information to navigate as a single human being.
Even the great filmmakers, Ari Aster, Hayao Miyazaki, or Tim Burton, must delegate such a huge amount of work to others that it’s debatable whether you can really call their films theirs.
Like sure, they steered the ship, but that one emotional scene may have been written by an intern or that one animation sequence that moved you was workshopped by everyone in the Writers' room.
To attribute the totality of the work to an individual is to repeat the mistake of great man theory historians.
And then this problem gets even worse when you get down to internet video where videos are often created by a single individual or a skeleton crew. The decisions are often not made thoughtfully.
Video creators are forced to make shortcuts.
It’s the only way to survive.
If there’s a shortcut you can take, but don’t, you end up never finishing the video that you were working on. Coupled with the volatility of financial feasibility, and you’ve got an art form that is functionally impossible to thrive under.
And even if you manage to successfully take shortcuts, identifying the minimum viable video to retain your audience, you’ll still find yourself burnt out and exhausted.
I was a full-time YouTube creator for about two years and I worked 16 hours a day every single day. I worked until my body screamed at me that I had to eat something or go to sleep.
It’s the kind of blessing that becomes a curse much faster than it has any right to. I’ve reflected quite a bit as to why I failed—ultimately realizing that, simply put, it was impossible to succeed. At least without outsourcing most of the actual work (which I was unwilling to do).
But it’s not just exhausting for video creation, I also don’t think video is great for viewers either.
The Viewers
To return to Gesamtkunstwerk, video should be the creative explosion that moves you in a way that no individual medium of art could do so on its own.
But is that really what’s happening with even the best video?
It seems more likely that these other additions of art—like music and entertaining visuals and so on—serve more as creative crutches than they do enhancements. Little dopamine hits that get you to pay attention to something you would otherwise not pay attention to.
With video, it goes in one eyeball and out the other.
How many times have you sat down to watch something and even though you spend 10 or 15 or even 50 hours watching it, you walk away without remembering anything?
It’s happened to me more than I care to admit.
It’s almost as if we are there for the spectacle instead of the substance.
Would you ever actually sit down and read a biography of Elvis Presley? Yeah, me either. But why is it that we sit down and spend hours watching the biopic?
The story is an excuse for the spectacle.
And just like most things we watch, we will immediately stop thinking about it the second that it’s not on the screen.
I know there’s a whole culture dedicated to film reviews and so on, but let’s be honest here: 99.9% of audience members of videos of any kind will almost instantly forget about it within days.
With a book, you might write in the margins or re-read a chapter because it really moves you. There is not really an equivalent in video. No one is watching those MrBeast videos with a pen and paper jotting down ideas they have—they’re just sitting there… watching. And I really don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that something similar is happening with most forms of video most of the time.
If you don’t care enough to read the book, is this really something you care about?
But it’s not just that you’re wasting your life paying attention to something you don’t actually care about, but there are very real consequences to your brain.
The Brainfood, Brainrot Spectrum
The way that I imagine forms of culture is as a spectrum. And I’m sure it goes without saying that short form video is at the brain rot end of the spectrum, the lowest common denominator. Stimulating, shallow, and spending enough time with it literally harms your attention span.
Obviously movies are nowhere near as intellectually stunting as short form video, but it still isn’t quite the same as reading a book.
When you think about reading, it’s not so much that you’re consuming it the way that you would a video, but moreso that you are co-creating the story in your head with the author. Engaging deeply with ideas, reading between the lines, anticipating what will happen next.
I’ve made a concerted effort in my personal life to start avoiding video as much as possible, and start reading. I have noticed a significant difference in how I feel.
With reading, there’s so much more going on inside.
This might sound silly, but when I feel like my brain has really tapped into something, I like to call it the galaxy brain feeling. It’s a sensation where I can literally feel my brain making all these different connections.
When I read a good book, the galaxy brain feeling happens every single time. It’s consistent. It shows up like Clockwork. I can literally feel the contours of my world of view expanding. It’s fucking amazing.
I’ve never really had the same feeling with video.
My hunch is that video is overwhelmingly a dumping ground of all of this external stimuli that is ultimately unimportant. And it would be much more beneficial as an audience member to appreciate the music or the pictures or the story for its own sake. Because if it’s not worth enjoying for its own sake, it shouldn’t be worth enjoying being stitched together like some kind of Frankenstein-like beast of hyper-stimulation.
Did you like this silly little brain dump?
I’d bet you enjoy my real essays ever more