movies & books & stuff

one of THOSE posts

Dec 19, 2023

Every December, the Internet is flooded with Top Tens, rankings, and “what you missed”s from critics, and thanks to something I call The Letterboxd/GoodReads Effect, now peasants do it, too.

And they do it about everything.

I can’t open Instagram post-Spotify-Wrapped-day without seeing someone listing and categorizing every movie/podcast/food/resulting bowel movement they encountered over the past year, and I truly believe 95% of these posts serve no purpose but to brag. Look how many books I read! Look what good taste I have! The question of “who cares?” is dismissed by the (remote) possibility that one of your followers wants to talk about it, and can’t people share whatever they want?

Sure they can. But it’s annoying.

(The “brag your accomplishments” threads are fine, if tedious, and at the end of 2021 I realized I hadn’t done anything all year so I forced myself to read Infinite Jest in five weeks, so I guess that’s a plus?)

My two least favorite types of these posts are the OK, GOOD FOR YOU kind and the WAY TOO MUCH DATA kind.

OK, GOOD FOR YOU is when someone recaps something that happened in their life, but in a way that makes it seem like they’re sharing a universal truth.

“This year, I decided to journal every day, and here’s how it changed me into a person who still uses social media a lot.”
“This was the year I took up running, and I am going to post screenshots of my tracking app showing how far and fast I ran every day, so that any stalkers out there know just where to find me.”
“The top three entirely original lessons I learned this year are Family Is Everything, Rest Is Okay and Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff.”
“It was a year of change. We moved, adopted a cat, and did five other things I already posted about when they happened. But through it all, my boring boyfriend was there to make me dinner and you need to know about that.”

OK, GOOD FOR YOU. Can you just post about cool stuff you want to share? Do you need to package it as a…treatise?

The WAY TOO MUCH DATA dump is when obsessive list-makers decide to share every single recipe they made and podcast they listened to and concert they saw, along with which ones they’d recommend. I’ve seen, on more than one occasion, lists made in the Notes App that have an asterisk for “good” and then the title in bold for “great” and italics for “did not finish.”

Babe, DID I ASK? That is so much to sort through! Just hit me with a top five and be on your business! Ever since Steven Soderbergh started listing every piece of content he consumes in a given year, nerds have been aping his spreadsheet, and I can’t explain it, but it’s millennial cringe.

tHaT sAiD…

I will, occasionally, find something of value within a well-curated list. A book I’d been meaning to read but forgot the title of, a show I couldn’t locate that has now hit streaming. And so, in the spirit of GETTING TO THE POINT, I present ENTIRELY WITHOUT COMMENTARY only the top top stuff I read/saw/heard this year (a bit of which came out in the past but which I only got into in 2023).

I’m also doing this because the end of the calendar year marks the kick-off of awards season, the least helpful listing-and-ranking process our culture has yet devised, so consider this my ballot for Best Whatever.