Is the media you consume rotting your brain?

Cru’s Letter

You are what you consume…

Not just what you eat.

How often do you actually listen to the music you hear?

How often do you zoom out and “watch yourself” scrolling on instagram?

How often do you question the information you take in?

The quality and depth of what you consume leads to quality and depth of how you think, see the world, and communicate.

It’s interesting what is most popular to consume these days. Mindless content, predictable music, and bite-sized information. I think this is a huge part of why we see such a deficit in the average ability to communicate and detect nuance. Patience and attention span are also at an all time low and I’d like to point out an interesting trend within music specifically;

The emphasis of music used to be musicianship and a tasteful exploration of music theory (generally speaking) but now we see a pretty significant dismissal of these things and instead, mainstream music focuses heavily on marketability.

I was recently watching a video of an old performance by James Brown and BB King and I want you to check it out and notice something aside from the absurd level of musical talent…

Their fluency of communication, body language, and emotion is top tier. You can also see how each of them has such an appreciation for the raw creativity coming from one another without assessing how many instagram followers the other has lol. Now, maybe I’m biased because the soul era is a huge personal favorite but I truly believe that if you spend enough time consuming this type of music, your brain will expand to be more creative, observational, and aware of detail (not just in music).

Sometimes trying to explain my thoughts on this kind of thing comes with the responsibility to not sound righteous but it’s difficult because I do believe there is some objectivity to how good or bad certain media is as long as you avoid reductionist thinking just for the sake of disproving it haha.

Surely I have some “hard work” bias built into my thinking here but something that is more difficult to create comes off as more valuable to me because value feels synonymous to uniqueness.

My real question is, are we allowed to conclude that a song that takes more talent to create and resonates emotionally is better than one that doesn’t? Of course people can like different things but using food as an analogy, someone liking a donut doesn’t make it good for you.

If you can’t tell, I’m pretty passionate about the music thing, hence my inability to stick to the general point of this letter. Without going further into the rabbit hole, I’d advise you to explore the world around you with consideration to deeper thinking.

Ask yourself when you’re watching or listening to something “is there more to this than meets the eye?”

It’s a powerful question to ask yourself because you’ll find out with just about any topic, the more you know, the more you don’t know.

-Cru