Books and Movies 2019: The Setup
In 2017, I kept a record of every movie I watched. Inspired by Steven Soderbergh’s yearly media diaries, I wanted to step things up in 2018.
Last year, I made a daily media diary for all the content I was consuming throughout the day. I recorded every movie and TV show I watched, every podcast and music album I listened to, every book I read and every video game I played.
What started as a New Years resolution and task to myself eventually became a comforting habit, and gave me a sense of accomplishment in a way. I was proud of how much media I consumed in 2018. Day to day, I would love seeing long entries with varied media throughout.
This sense of accomplishment was fascinating to me — we live in a time where, for most of us, some form of media is what we engage with the most in our daily lives. I’m more engaged with things happening on my computer, phone, and TV than almost anything else. For better or worse, this is the way it is. I don’t hate it, to be honest. I’m someone who wants to contribute to that — I make things that people will watch, read, or listen to. I’m writing this in order to share it with people, not to keep it to myself. I’m part of the problem, but it doesn’t feel that way.
After a year of keeping a complete daily media diary, I thought I would feel relieved to stop having to scour IMDb to find the writers and directors of movies to write them down, or the names of TV episodes. It was tasking, and I thought I would be ready to go into 2019 and further by letting media be what it had been to me before: Most things are there for the moment, then they fly away to make space for the next thing I consume.
I was wrong.
I miss it. I miss capturing these things that are temporary, but lasting, each contributing to some larger statement of how I spent so much of my time, busy and free. Becoming aware of how I was spending my time and what I was surrounding with gave me an insight into where my mind was on that day, week, or month. Turns out, I don’t like letting those things flutter away into the distance just to make room for more.
So — in 2019, I’ll be slightly modifying my media diary. Less formatting, less content, something more manageable that still helps me feel some sense of accomplishment in my media consumption.
Books and Movies. That’s all I’ll be recording. The books I read or listen to, and the movies I watch. Everything else can fall away into memories and the empty space of my mind that will remember consuming but won’t really remember what was consumed.
