Television

I mean, that's because we have more options for entertainment than ever before. If something is mid, why should I watch it over the 10,000+ 10/10s that I haven't experienced yet, or even worse, why should I watch it over rewatching one of the 100s of 10/10s I already know and love? There's only so many hours in the day that you have to watch something, why would you willingly spend time on mid content?

I was focused on the production side, which I do think is primary in this issue, but i agree that there's a cultural issue on the consumer side as well.

I think it's an artifact of our accelerated society. When I was a kid, most of the adults I knew worked fairly regular hours at one job, came home, and watched a tremendous amount of cable TV. Movies were a special occasion at the theater, or there was some home theater. And video games were still new.

Now, most of the adults i know either work 2 jobs or work 1 job that stresses them out badly enough to be two. It also feels like maintaining life is just harder. Things should be faster but there's so many scams and middlemen now that you spend a lot of time researching and navigating situations to avoid trouble.

They stream media and play video games, and they have so much choice but so little time that it feels like you need to maximize the fun time.

But I think all that is still downstream from the capitalist mode of overproduction.