Linda Holmes at NPR’s MonkeySee pop culture blog has a great essay about how I shouldn’t despair about not getting around to every book, movie, or TV show on my “to consume” list. The sheer amount of human creative output is so vast that we can never hope to absorb the totality of even the best works. Even though digital technology has made all this content more accessible than ever, we will die without having experienced little more than a sliver of all that humanity has thought, dreamed, and shared over the millennia. And that’s okay.
I would sometimes chastise myself for failing to read a certain author or to familiarize myself more with a certain genre of music. But I continue to read, to listen to music, to watch movies. I’ll eventually get to some of the things on my list, but not all of them. My curiosity will never be satisfied, nor should it be. I’ll do my best to explore and sample, which is probably the best any of us can do.
