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Hello, friends. This is probably, in fact, quite possibly the last episode of this podcast that I'm recording in 2024. You will be listening to this sometime in the middle of January because I, you know, schedule episodes in advance these days on account of the fact that I need to get rid of the tendency in me that has to do everything now. And I'm trying to bring more order to the way I make things and the way I work.
But, you know, new year resolutions are a dime a dozen. I think I did fairly well on the resolutions I made last year. I had promised myself that I will cook at least a full meal all by myself for my entire family and I did not do that. But I did promise myself that I will have some more discipline in my personal life as far as social media is concerned, as far as waking up and going to sleep is concerned and I did do that fairly well. I failed on occasion, but by and large, I did fairly well. And I also promised myself that I just spoke about social media. I promised myself that I will reduce my reliance on social media tools, etc. And I did that really well. I really quit Instagram and Twitter and Instagram. I'm now social media free and that I'm very happy about.
So 2024, as far as my personal, as far as the things that I can affect in my own life, I did okay, I think. But then there comes another year and you think, what other changes do I need to make? Do I need to make any changes at all? And the answer to that is usually yes, because we are never satisfied. But I was looking at the year and it is 2025. And what struck me about it is that I grew up in the 90s, where the 21st century looked like a very optimistic place to be. A great, nice period of time where a lot of problems will be gone. We were optimistic about the future, even as far back as the 60s and 70s. Science fiction used to imagine the 21st century as the promised land of some sort, where when we get there, it'll all be great. And of course, things are not great, but also things could be worse. And maybe that worse is yet to come. Maybe it is still in our future and we are not there yet, but we are heading there and we will get there. Who knows?
But what struck me about 2025 is that we are almost 25 years into the 21st century. That's one-fourth of the 21st century. That's 25% of the 21st century. That's where we are right now. There is only three fourths of the 21st century left. I was looking at our lifespans, like, you know, 70, 75, 80 years. And with some help, maybe a hundred years. I was looking at our lifespans and wondering why we pay the century so much importance. I think it's because it is the closest round number that can correspond to our, to our idea of a lifespan.
But if we lived for as long as a fruit fly does, our youngest people, our most enthusiastic hormonal teenagers, for lack of a better word, adolescents, will have been born this morning. And our most respected elders, the champions of our community, the thought leaders, the kings and the emperors, etc., will have been born last Friday. And then maybe every weekend would be a time when we wonder if we have lived our lives in a virtuous manner. Maybe every weekend would be a time for us to leave lessons for future generations. It's Saturday. I'm about to die. I hope that people who were born this morning are kind to each other, that are people who will grow up by Monday to be good, humane beings and that they will contribute meaningfully to our society and that our society will continue to live on and prosper. And by society, of course, they mean the little group of larva that is in a puddle of water by the corner of a algae-covered pond much as we do.
For us, that algae-covered pond is a planet and we have dreams of reaching out to the edge of the solar system and beyond, maybe. But for the most part, as far as reality is concerned, we are only concerned with this little rock on which we live. And it's not even like we don't think about the weekend. We do think about the weekend. Half our life, if you are an urban professional keyboard worker of some sort, then your life is spent waiting for the weekend. Even during the week when you are working, you are thinking about the weekend. You are thinking about how nice it would feel to have a day or two in a seven day week when you can do whatever you want. When you can not work, when you don't have to reply to office emails, when you don't have to give details of your work done that day to your superior and you can just spend it sitting quietly or reading or drinking or traveling.
Of course, the weekend is only two days, if that, and it is not sufficient time to do anything, really. Anything meaningful, that is. I've spoken before about how we assign value to things on the basis of how much time they take, as in letters take time to write and to send and to read so they have more value than your average WhatsApp message which isn't really limited by time and space so we use it for anything really. A letter is, a letter has more value in our eyes because it takes time and effort. Things that don't take time and effort have less value. And because we measure value through time, unless you take a proper vacation and spend the time and effort on doing something that is valuable to you, you will not be able to get that kind of value from the weekend because the weekend isn't enough time to do anything, really. Except to, I mean, the one good utility that a weekend has is recovering from the week. The week was hard and it took a lot out of you. The weekend is the time when you heal from the weak before jumping right back into the next week and suffering until the next weekend.
I was reading this report in a newspaper about film critics talking about how influencer culture is affecting them, how influencer culture is reducing the value of the film critic and I don't disagree with them because film criticism is an art form in and of itself. It's a proper discipline. It's a proper genre of quote-unquote content. But influencer culture where these days we have videos, we're reviewing movies, etc., those reviews don't really go anywhere. And you can tell the difference between a review done by someone qualified and a review done by someone who's just a fan. I mean, no disrespect to fans, fan culture has its own value, but it is not a replacement for the critic or a review done by a proper critic.
So there is something to be said in favor of what is generally described as the snobbish critic. But I was thinking about how the critic's position has also changed over time, right? Because there was a time when fewer movies used to come out. And to watch even one movie in a movie theater was a luxury. Families used to make it a special occasion. These days you can just drop into a cinema hall on the weekend by yourself even and just watch a movie and leave because you can afford it. But there was a time when maybe five movies come out and you can't afford to watch five because they're not all streaming online because there is no online. There's only the movie theater. And you have to decide which one to spend your money on. And the film critics, the reviewers job was to tell you what they thought of these movies so that you could make a decision about which one is worth your money.
These days, on account of the fact that every movie is available everywhere all the time for very cheap, although that is also something that we need to talk about at a later point because streaming itself is becoming something that is unaffordable. You cannot possibly subscribe to every streaming platform because it ends up costing you more than your TV connection did. And streaming was supposed to be the antidote for the expensive TV channel system. But that's a different point to be discussed at a later point. I was talking about how the critic, the reviewer, had to make it easy for you to decide what to spend your limited money on.
These days, movies are available everywhere and the job of the reviewer is to tell you what to spend your limited time on. So we have gone from money to time. Once upon a time, our biggest problem was I have this much money. I can't spend. I can't spend it. It is not enough to watch all the movies, even though there's just five choices in front of me. I can. It is possible. I have the time to watch all of it. I don't have the money to watch all of it. So I'll read a review to find out what to spend my money on. These days you have money and the movies are available for relatively cheap. But there are 2,586 of them and you literally cannot sit and watch all of it. So you will watch the review for a different reason now. You watch the review to decide what to spend your time on. Which movie is the best use of your time? Which movie is worth your time?
And in addition to all of that, we have thrown another thing into the mix. The review is no longer appearing in the newspaper. The review is also appearing on a screen, on a streaming platform like YouTube. The review is appearing on a screen and the screen is the same screen on which a person is going to watch that movie. So once upon a time, the review was in print and the film was on a big, unaffordable screen. Now, the film, the review, and the influencer who the critic is complaining about are all on the same screen. So, this has been a bit of a uniter. It has been a bit of a level playing field. But it has also meant the reduction of value. Because, you know, religious pilgrimages often end up being in distant places because the logic was if you are truly devoted, you will travel the distance. You will go to where you need to go. You will spend the effort and the time and the energy and you will take the pains in order to get to the pilgrimage because that is what God or your faith requires of you.
And to some extent, our media consumption habits back in the day reflected this too. Cinema is important and if you value it, you will put in the effort and the time and you will take the pains to travel to the cinema hall, get in line, get the tickets and then sit in one place for two and a half hours and watch an entire film with your entire family. These days, the effort has gone out of it. So you don't really have to put in that much effort to watch a film. You don't have to put in that much effort to read the review either by a critic or a reviewer. You don't have to put in that much effort to watch the influencer who's talking about cinema. So in our heads, the amount of importance a film has is the same as the amount of importance a critic has, is the same amount of importance that an influencer has, because we are exerting exactly the same amount of time and effort in our pursuit of all these three, in our consumption of all these three.
So going to the cinema hall is an option now. And I think the only people, or rather, people go to cinema halls not to watch the film itself. They are going to the cinema hall for community, to be able to hear other people laugh and cry, to be able to exist next to other human beings as they experience what we experience. Watching something on your mobile screen is not quite the same experience because it is solitary and it is entirely too simple and too easy to have value value of the sort that something has when it takes time and effort to access it so what do all these things have in common all these things that i talked about the 21st century the fact that only three-fourths of it remains. The fact that fruit flies live for five days and the fact that time and effort play a role in the kind of discussions we are having right now about film criticism and influencer culture.
The connecting factor, in case you did not put it together until now, is time, effort, and value. And I'm not sure if this has been the most coherent episode of this podcast ever, but I have been wondering about time, effort, and value to some degree over the last few months because my own life has undergone a series of changes with respect to time, effort, and value. I'm trying to utilize my time in a way that maximizes the value I get out of it or maximize the value that can be gotten out of it because it is not only value for me it is value for everyone who lives around me if I'm spending my time staring at a screen looking at mind-dumping short-form content I get very little value from it but if I don't do that and I read a book or I write something or even spend time with a loved one that is more value not just for me but for the people around me also I hope that this episode was of value to you that the amount of time you spent on it was not didn't feel like it was a waste to you and if that is the case then hopefully you'll subscribe to the podcast if you're listening to this podcast on spotify or apple podcast thank you for doing so give it a rating or something. And if you're not, then you're probably listening to it on the website. That's www.vimoh.in. I thank you for it. There is a support link on top, which you can click to support this podcast. And that's it. I will see you in the next one. And until then, please take care of yourselves. Bye!
Links and resources
Film critics' role in shaping cinema faces new challenges amid social media influence
I used Fruit flies as a kind of placeholder for a life form with a short life span. But the range is wider. Mayflies, for example, can sometimes survive for only a day.
