Do you actually remember what you read last year?
Is it a waste of time to consume content that's never going to cross your mind again?
I’ve consumed an enormity of content in the last year, but while on a particularly existential train ride, I realised that I struggled to recall a vast majority of the things I’ve read over the year. Only defaulting to the name of the piece and even less of the lessons or contents within them. This issue compounds further when taking into account the hours I spent on YouTube, on other blogs, podcasts, movies and TV shows.
Was it a waste of time to consume all these things if none of them are ever going to cross your mind again? Did it matter?
It is easy to disclaim any value from this abundance of content. To say that it doesn’t matter because most things that cross our eyes are not important or impactful enough to claim any real estate in our consciousness. Though it doesn't matter very much because we often let them, they are there to fill time and make you feel a certain way at that given moment. The feeling that is extracted at that given moment is the actual value we as consumers seek to gain. To feel smart, to feel justified, to feel vindicated, or to numb the presence of all feeling.
Some pieces have a longer lifetime value to certain individuals because it keeps providing them with those same feelings. Which either allows the individual to derive further meaning from it or remain in their ever-shrinking echo chamber until they inevitably get bored and crave novelty, but I digress. It is part of the fun, the treasure hunt to find feeling in this endless sea of content. Bonus points if it is something that you can share with someone, which explains the popularity of Instagram Reels.
Whether or not you think it is a waste of time depends on what you were going to do with said time. It is like saying that you are not wasting time because you went cold turkey on doomscrolling, when you don’t actually know what to do with the time you now have an abundance of.
Like, ok, for sure, I definitely would like to do something extremely productive without knowing what that is, at the end of a long work day, and I don’t have the capacity to feel anything anymore. Content is there. Content is the most effective means of time travel. Content allows me to lie there, numb to any feeling and occasionally make my brain chemicals do a little jiggle when the algorithms will it.
It is, however, a waste of time when we are deluding ourselves into thinking that passive consuming is a replacement for active improvement. That cringe when you hear people say that they learn everything they know from YouTube (or worse, TikTok), but haven’t actually tried to do it. It is the new age of saying: “I can totally write a book, I’ve read the Iliad.”
You will never learn how to build a table on your own by just reading the Ikea manual. And you will likely never retain that information from building it while passively following the instructions. Content has that same appeal; it makes you feel and sometimes produce something that feels good, without giving you the actual skills to engage in it independently. Sometimes, most of the time, that is sufficient. But it is a waste of time to only consume it passively without any effort to further engage with it outside of the screen, and claiming otherwise.
So, no, consuming all this content that I will likely never remember again is not inherently a waste of time. But yes, it can be used more deliberately, rather than passively and reflexively time-travel with it.
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In the process of writing this, I realise that my understanding of time travel is more in line with Adam Sandler’s Click than it is with any other piece of science fiction. Take it how you may.
Things I’ve read in 2025 that have stuck in my head: