Adrián A. Davín’s website

Random thoughts

Risks of Cultural Abundance

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We live in a time with endless opportunities to consume all sorts of cultural products. Movies, series, documentaries, books, comics, blogs, you name it. With the advent of AI, I expect the cultural production of our world will only increase. In such a world, there are at least two challenges that I think are worth considering at a personal level:

  1. Choosing what to consume. It is too easy to consume whatever they are showing on Netflix, a random book with a catchy title that just became popular this year or a YouTube channel that puts out some interesting content every day. Very often, we just slide into certain cultural spheres without realizing it. I would like to be agentic about this and decide consciously what I consume and what I do not. Even if I live until I am 100 years old, the amount of content I will be able to absorb is just a microscopic fraction of all the work created out there by all sorts of people across time and geography. For that reason, I think it is worth making that tiny fraction the best of the very best. I have always tried, but I think it is good to have a reminder to continue to strive.

  2. The temptation to only consume. It is too easy to just want to consume culture. It is easy to be under the impression that everything worth saying, reading or watching has already been put forward by someone, somewhere. I do think this is mostly true. However, I could bet that most content creators who made anything at all started producing culture that they did not believe was worth paying attention to: they just did it in spite of some embarrassment about the quality of their work. Also, I am a firm believer that the only way to improve at something is to just do the damn thing.

    My teacher Jose Maria told me not long ago that I am an explorer, but only an explorer of the worlds that other people have created. This was undoubtedly a valid criticism and one worth listening to, so I decided to shut up, listen to his advice and do something about it. That something is this blog.