Whose art recommendations do you trust and follow up on? What informs what you read, watch, listen to? Not every influence has your best interests at heart.

People love recommending TV shows you just have to watch, and algorithms serve up songs and movies to keep us hooked, whatever their quality. People only have so much time and mental energy to devote to art after work or family obligations or whatever. Still, it’s precious and shouldn’t be wasted: the hours and days that go by are our lives going by.

Tired people need to chill, but we all need to be stimulated, challenged, and excited by art. These things can be hard to reconcile.

I get why people just want to relax and not think too hard after a long work day. Watching, listening, or reading really good stuff can take a certain amount of energy, and if you don’t have it, you don’t have it. But we only get one life and there are some invaluable treasures in art you’ll never discover if you don’t actively seek them out, because you can’t trust the algorithm or even beloved friends to put them in front of you.

So assuming there’s sufficient time and mental energy, what are you trying to get out of the art you consume? To push your own boundaries and find something cool you didn’t know about? To learn? Finally understand the popular thing or social phenomenon everyone’s talking about? Read that Canon work to see if it lives up to its reputation? Something else? So long as you’re asking the question, there are no wrong answers.

This to me is such an important but also personal and private conversation. But in a certain way it can seem hollow and artificial the more public it is. Sometimes when people talk about art, the subtext has a high-schooley feel–people say they love certain art for prestige or to signal that they’re sophisticated or cool or whatever. In this way, art isn’t something personally enjoyed or even consumed, it’s merely a flag you wave so other people can you waving it.

OK, this does happen sometimes, where the trappings of art become more important than its substance. But let’s put that aside. I’ll write this now with hope, trusting that we’re all above this kind of silly thing.

The question that interests me is: what responsibility does a person have to themselves to ensure that their own inner life is cool, fun, stimulating? For a person to ignore or neglect their inner life, or not make of it what they could…it’s sad. You never know what you’re missing out on until you find it. Lots of the stuff you need for a rousing inner life is free or close to free. The barriers aren’t financial. What are the barriers?

We’re in an attention economy where companies compete for your time. Touchscreens are designed to attach people to their devices and keep scrolling, even if the “content” sucks. Every streaming platform recommends whatever art they spent the most money to produce or acquire, as if your aesthetic sensibilities and their profit motive are aligned.

Let’s be clear: there’s no connection whatsoever between artistic worth and money. None. I’ll even allow that some expensive Netflix or MCU schlock can be OK to watch. It’s fun, mindless entertaining shit that sometimes you’re just in the mood for. Fine, but that can’t be the ceiling. It’s just too narrow.

Who knows how many billions or trillions the advertising industry is worth, and this influence machine normalizes mediocre art and obviously ads to the point some people watch advertising voluntarily, as if it’s art. Commercials often try to camouflage themselves as art.

I saw the other day on social media, a one-minute Pedro Pascal commercial was called a “short film.” This is typical. The point is to make people give up their own free time voluntarily, a trap made by people who don’t care about you. If you added up all the time you’ve spent watching ads versus, say, reading novels, or consuming whatever other form of art you like…would you like the results?

We are all exposed to countless ads a day, yet nobody really likes them. If you asked anybody “what’s better, art or advertising?,” everybody would say art. While there’s no definitive way to measure this, I suspect many people spend more time consuming ads than art.

The dominant forms of technology ram commercials down your throat. TV has commercials, the internet has pop up ads. Google is beyond broken; years ago, when you typed in a word, the dictionary definition and Wikipedia used to be the first results. Now, it’ll show you a local business with that word in it. People think of Google as a pure, uncorrupted way to get reliable unbiased information, when really companies pay to influence you. This foggy force is the kind of thing people need to cut through to find art that they’ll actually like, instead of what someone is trying to sell to them.

People who preemptively and actively avoid ads by not having screens are thought to be weirdos and freaks. We hate the guy who makes it a point to say they don’t even own a TV!

I’m not here to take a highbrow shit on people for trying to get by and enjoy what spare time they have however they want. I just hope people take agency over their own inner life and treat this responsibility seriously. You only get one life! I encourage anybody to muster up the energy and the will to explore and roam freely and deeply is all.

High brow, low brow, whatever. Follow critics or people you respect, but as you get off the beaten path you’ll also come to trust your own inclinations and tastes as a compass and follow it where it takes you. Yes, practically speaking, you can talk about popular art with other people since they’re likely to consume it too. The more personal or off the beaten path something is, the less likely you’ll be able to share it.

The flip side of this is that popular art is like buying off the rack, whereas weirdo stuff that suits your tastes more closely feels more tailor made. This is about who you are in private moments, when you’re lying in bed at night, when the world is still and you’re just thinking about stuff. When your mind is wandering when it doesn’t have anywhere to be. Lest this sound too grand, frankly, I often fall asleep watching YouTube videos, mostly people building log cabins or analyzing chess games. Last night it was incredible videos about sound waves. Just find your thing.

The internet can be an infinite, invaluable resource that connects you to other people with precisely your niche interests, but before finding that, you’ll need to actively sidestep its traps and avoid what it’s trying to sell. You can’t just choose to have a luxurious mansion then have it appear, but the decision to avoid the mediocrity shoved your way and get into some cool weirdo art that enriches your life is fully in your hands.