Spotify has a habit of suggesting podcasts. There’s one in particular that gets recommended to me over and over again, with a title something along the lines of “Your Favorite Band Sucks.”
Why would I be the least bit interested in this?
Why is it we citizens of the internet have decided it’s fun or cool or interesting to hate things so much? We write articles and tweet lists like, “Most Overrated Movies of the Last 10 Years,” or “Twenty-Five Reasons This Particular Thing is Terrible.” Everything is snarky and sarcastic and ironic.
I had a teacher who used to say sarcasm is the poor man’s wit. If this is the case, it appears everyone on the internet is bankrupt. And we don’t have to be.
While this certainly falls under the umbrella of “Why be mean when you could just be quiet?” I’ll actually take this a step further. Why spend so much energy on the things you hate when you could instead you could share the things you love?
Why be sarcastic when you could be earnest?
Instead of shit-talking certain art/music/movies/politics and the people who love these things, we should be sharing the things we love and encouraging other people to love them too. And I don’t mean shaming others for not liking them.
Instead of saying, “Oh, you’ve never seen Star Wars? What’s wrong with you?” the conversation should be something along the lines of, “You’ve never seen Star Wars? Here’s why I think you’d love it, let me share this experience with you.”
Let’s stop making ourselves the police of bad taste and accept that in our media-saturated world, there is no universal metric for what makes something good. Some art speak to some people and other art speak to other people and that’s okay.
Maybe accepting this would help make the world a little kinder, a little softer, a little bit more fun.
joshua chamberlain 