Too Much of a Good Thing

In the time since my previous article, I have finished reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov,

Jonathan Haidt

’s The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Malcolm X’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Hayley, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and also Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America. I am currently sixty-one percent of the way through Gary M. Burge’s 2004 work, Whose Land? Whose Promise?: What Christians Are Not Being Told about Israel and the Palestinians, while I am simultaneously forty-four percent of the way through

Katelyn Beaty

’s Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits Are Hurting the Church. I’d wager that it’s been my second-most productive reading year so far since junior high school—in 2021 or so, I did reread the entirety of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potterseries in about two months.

I believe I can officially call myself a fan of Steinbeck at this point, no matter how pretentious that may sound. I find his prose to be beautiful and his observations of the human spirit truthful yet gracious. East of Eden showered me in a plethora of emotions, and his nonfiction road trip memoir continuously gave me the itch to write something—anything—myself. Well, here I am writing a thing.

I’ve been reflecting lately on the manner in which I consume art these days in contrast to how it used to capture and consume me. One clear example can be examined within the realm of music. I fondly remember the excitement experienced as a teenage child of discovering an unexpected, newly released CD from a band or solo artist whom I cherished suddenly sitting on a shelf in a store. I’d purchase the CD, go home, immediately place it in my bedroom CD player, and listen through the new album multiple times in a row, all the while reading along through the lyric booklet that came in the front of the disc’s jewel case. I’d listen to the album each night as I drifted off to sleep. I’d listen to it each morning as I readied myself for school. I’d dedicate multiple hours to converting the CD’s audio files to MP3s on my desktop computer, carefully adding as much metadata to each file as possible—artist name, album title, song title, release date, album artwork, lyrics, et cetera—and copying those carefully curated and organized audio files onto my little generic MP3 player so that I could listen to the album repeatedly as I mowed the lawn or rode my bike or walked around town.

Until just last year when I purchased an extremely new (used) Toyota Prius, I always had a CD in my vehicle’s CD player. One CD would stay in my car for months at a time before being replaced by another. Sadly though, my latest car, despite (or perhaps more accurately because of) its extreme modernity, has no CD player. In fact, a startling number of musicians that I’ve followed for years and even decades have stopped releasing music in the format of compact discs. It really rustles my jimmies.

This is all a direct result of the music streaming phenomenon of the past decade, which has truly been a double-edged sword. I’ve discovered so much great music because of it—music that I never would have come across without the wondrous discovery and recommendation algorithms pioneered by the Swedish miracle that is Spotify. The subscription-based music streaming platform model also provided me with a pain-free way to “try out” artists and albums at any time and in any place without the necessity of forking over the dough for a product that I didn’t know if I would even like or want. The music streaming revolution has provided me with benefits for which I will be forever grateful. I don’t believe I would be the same person I am today without all the wonderful art it has brought my way.

But, most unfortunately, it has also formed me into so much more of a consumeristic and ADHD listener of music. When all I had were MP3 and CD players, I would savor a single album for months; now I blaze through what seems like a new album every other week. It seems that, in the world of streaming having made the process of releasing and distributing music much simpler and faster than it ever was before 2010, the average person has been left drowning in an endless sea of content. Too much of a good thing . . . has caused me to unconsciously devalue each great thing. I am becoming convinced that I am actually doing a disservice to the artists I admire by consuming so much of their art that I end up reducing it to mere content rather than savoring a healthy portion of it and allowing it to remain something set apart and important. Perhaps I should look into what it would take to have a CD player installed in my new (used) car. It would probably be quite a hassle and cost a pretty penny.

But the cost of not doing so may be greater.