Overloaded: Is there simply too much culture?

I'm not overloaded by popular culture, I just ignore most of it.

I know what I like, and the rest of it I just pay no attention to. Most popular culture I like is stuff from the last few decades of last century (showing my age I suppose), although occasionally something new comes along that appeals to me, but most new things I just ignore. If someone makes a reference to something I don't get, I'll Google the reference, read enough about it to get the point, then move on.

It isn't just popular culture. Humanity has multiple civilisations whose literatures go back thousands of years. There is just so much, whether books just published last week or ancient manuscripts, that nobody could ever possibly read it all, everybody has to pick out the parts that interest them and pass over the rest. I'm sure for many people there must be some hidden gems which they would have really enjoyed, except for the fact that they'll live their whole life and never once stumble upon them.

Ever since I read The Triumph of Time in high school, my favourite poet has always been Algernon Charles Swinburne. If I had lived in the second half of the 19th century, that would have been rather mainstream, hip and trendy even; in the 21st century, that makes me somewhat idiosyncratic. I don't care. (I also don't care what T. S. Eliot thought about Swinburne, in case anyone wants to bring that up.)

I feel like this way but not just about entertainment, about everything in general. From one perspective, it's the success of capitalism, such a wide variety of offerings that there is sure to exist something for everyone, on the other hand, the more options you have, the more wrong options you need to avoid.

While having too many options isn't a massive issue for relatively small purchases, if I have a meh lunch or get a car wash that felt lacking, it's no biggie, but for larger purchases it's a bit paralyzing.

My headphones broke recently, and it took me a good week and a half to figure out what I wanted to buy. Search filters help, narrowing it a price range, a type (earbuds were what I ended up deciding on), then gaining access to further filters for things like battery life, but even after all of that, I'm still left with 100s of options, and many of the things I care about are qualitative and can't be filtered for, things like sound quality or ear comfort.

I've been wanting a new laptop for a while and reaching a decision on that seems like an absolutely daunting task. I agree with the article, there really is too much stuff. We have reviewers and aggregators to help alleviate that, we hope that they can curate the best stuff and we don't have to do the work ourselves. But then, there's too many reviewers and aggregators, so now I feel we need an aggregator for aggregators, a reviewer for reviewers, just to figure out who's being paid off by marketing teams, who's churning out surface level reviews for clicks, and who's actually worth listening to.

Entertainment is a subset of culture is it not?

The author winds up answering "no" to his own question. By thus rendering the entire point of his own article moot, he ironically reveals it to be exactly the type of pointless content that could lead one to question whether we do have too much of it.

I think ultimately it says something good about the tremendous wealth of our society that we can afford to support huge industries employing millions to do nothing but create trivial content. Before mass production people would make textiles at home as piecework, but it was grueling, boring work that paid a pittance. In the current age people can make quite a comfortable living creating online content at home, all while themselves consuming podcasts or peeking at TikTok clips.