When I was newly married and used to work as a Master Control Operator for a local Fox affiliate, I would work ten hour shifts and not get off until 10:30pm at night. This required my wife and I to become night people or else we would have never seen each other with her working daytime hours. She would wait until I got off work for us to enjoy our time off late into the night, doing what everyone else does only 5 hours later, typically when everyone else was already in bed. Things like buying groceries, shopping, going out to eat, or just being lazy at home.
This was back in the mid to early 2000s so we didn’t have the night owl’s best friend of streaming television yet and we were also still a couple years away from even having Netflix mail us movies to our house. We also didn’t have a lot of money so there was no affording cable TV, so off-air content was all we had and most things that late at night weren’t generally worth watching. This often led us to going to video rental stores.
Now, back then I had mixed feelings about going. I loved watching new movies and could get excited about the prospect of seeing something new, but I’ve also been with my wife for long enough to know that there’s a good chance she would have trouble making a decision on what to rent.
I kid you not, there was multiple times we’d go into the store and would look over a few initial choices, not sure if one of those would be our choice. We’d then spend the next 40 minutes to an hour combing through the selection to just leave the store with one of the first couple of options we considered. After working a 10 hour shift, I left the store not a very happy camper.
*Sixteen years later*
Most video rental stores are dead and gone now, and I would trade almost anything to have those experiences again. I know, this would be the time some of you would say “OK Boomer” but I’m not saying that “things were better in my time” I’m trying to say that we’re losing the ability to experience things anymore. Not to mention I'm way too young to be a Boomer, think more slacker.
Sure we still watch movies, read books, listen to music, chat with friends, etc.. but everything has become so on-demand that we lost the experience of holistically enjoying them. Before you “OK Boomer” me again, please hear me out. Watching a new movie used to be a whole night event. You’d first find the time to watch a movie because it wasn’t only an experience that lasted the run length of the movie. It also involved getting dressed, getting into the car, driving to the video rental place, making a choice or movie, possibly then going to a grocery store to pick up snacks to eat while watching the movie, and then going home. Only now is it time to watch a movie.
It became a whole night event, all the steps before watching the movie built on the anticipation of the event. After you made your choice you got kind of excited about your choice because you’ve now invested a lot of time and effort (and money) into the experience. It’s in contrast to now just plopping down on your couch and scrolling through infinite options and getting instantly satisfied. Don’t get me wrong, I love all the options, but again there was a thrill to finding the last copy available at the video rental store of a new release. You had spent time hoping, and sometimes praying, that you’d find a copy.
Now this doesn’t only apply to watching movies at home, you can build a case for any of the examples I mentioned before. Reading a new book required a trip to the bookstore or the library, again creating a whole experience around it. Same goes for getting new music as well. Often these experiences required you to talk to people, sometimes strangers, on what you should select. As a teenager I’d spend hours in bookstores or music stores just wandering the aisles discovering new things. Sometimes going with my friends and sharing recommendations with each other, and sometimes striking up conversations with employees or other shoppers to do the same things.
I was creating experiences around all of these things. In some ways I was creating communities around them also. A clerk at a local record store was a big fan of all the music I was buying that he allowed me to buy a brand new album of an artist I loved a day early of it’s release date. You can’t do that anymore.
Convenience is great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s gotten to a state that it’s killing these times of human interaction. These times to get out of the house and make a commitment to see something through. You purchase something that ended up being less than you hoped? Well dang it, I’m going to see it through I’ve committed myself this far!
For a while I’d share my thoughts on how we’re losing the experience of doing things with coworkers and friends, often with counter arguments on how I’m sounding old and out of touch. I let is slide, thinking maybe I was just stuck in a craving of nostalgia, but at dinner a couple days ago I received some affirmation.
We were discussing which of the movies in the newest Star Wars trilogy was each of our favorites. My teenage daughter said it was The Force Awakens, and it was because she remembers us having to go to the theater over an hour before the showtime to only wait in line to make sure we could get good seats all together. When we went to see The Rise of Skywalker the theater had moved over to you now purchase your exact seat, guaranteed you know where you’re sitting, and eliminating the long wait in lines before shows. I love how stress free that is for me now, but we lost the whole experience of the event.
We used to stand in the line, talking with the strangers around us about our hopes for the new movie. We saw our other nerdy friends in the lobby by chance. It was a whole experience that has been eliminated, and thank God, my teenager has noticed the difference. Even though she and her siblings whined like no tomorrow when it was happening, she now looks back at that experience fondly and it colors her enjoyment positively of the movie.
I pray and hope that brick and mortar stores will come back, and people will feel the need for tangible experiences again. I think it’ll happen, partially because I see my kids wanting it. I mean, they were PISSED when all the Toys ‘R Us stores closed. They still ask when they’re all coming back. As we wait for the rest of the world to catch up with us, we need to all work on getting up off the couch and out to purposely make experiences happen because the world has effectively eliminated them from our everyday life, all in the name of convenience.
