1. You’re tired already, and anticipating the sheer weight of emotion that might be dredged up by an unfamiliar but well-written story makes you uncomfortable. There is too much emotion on your plate already. Someday you’ll be up for it, but not now.
2. You’re tired already, and the discourse around this new piece of media is so active that the thought of joining it in any capacity, even if only to passively read it, is overwhelming. The specter of not only having to feel, but of having to describe the feelings and understand where they reside in relation to you, hangs between you and the work like a greasy sneeze guard.
3. You fear it will be complex and thought-provoking, which will put additional strain on your already fragile, strained, and assaulted identity, forcing you to reinvent another shred of your tattered self. Every day is already an attack, a re-invention, placing the tracks behind your wheels to justify your presence, and each moment threatens to estrange you from yourself forever, derailed.
4. You suspect you might enjoy it less than your friends do, and be forever doomed to be the buzzkill. It’s much easier to be the one who has missed out, to simply have to see/read/hear it, than to be the one who did so and didn’t experience the passion – and then have to describe why. The worst part is you might actually love it, if you ever tried – but the fear of becoming the wedge prevents one from joining the whole.
5. You might absolutely love it, and then one day later find out that the production of it required acute suffering and exploitation, forever making you feel ever so slightly complicit for singing its praises. We have all become complicit in this manner over the last few decades, and are caught between decrying the injustice and admitting that this injustice lives on in our marrow. It is a familiar sensation and one that just becomes harsher.
6. You may feel no strong feelings one way or another about it, and fear after a few such experiences that the ability to care and love art and ideas has died in you. It’s quiet at first, but each new failure of emotion and inspiration inflates the fear, until one day it shatters when you find the passion again. In the meanwhile, a quiet dread leads you forth, from one dry well to another.
7. You might enjoy it just enough to partake in more but not enough to glean any significant pleasure from it, and find yourself endlessly locked into a series of works that leave you at best numb but claim countless hours from you. The clammy grasp of cold creature comforts keeps you from sleeping, and half-awake you wait in vain for a jolt to truly awaken you.
8. You’re uncertain where enjoying this media places you on the battlefields of the culture war, and are afraid that by choosing to enjoy or deride it you will have accidentally donned a combatant uniform. So many factions have emerged and more emerge each day, and every work becomes a coded query on what you believe and what you care about. Rather than be thought a fool, you keep silent and remove all your doubts.
9. You know it’s the sort of thing you might love and have an unforgettable experience of, but aren’t sure how to have that experience without somehow ruining it, being too busy, too preoccupied, in the wrong place or time or mood, and so you forever keep this would-be revelation at arm’s length.
The process is one of emotional regulation, of balancing aesthetic and intellectual pleasures, of maintaining emotional distance and intimacy in perfect proportion. To live our lives we end up using subpar ingredients simply for their familiarity – and, because we must worry so much, we are outpaced in joy by those who do not care, and the most callous taste reigns.