07/08/2026: My Long-Lost Favorite Things
Lately I’ve been nostalgic for all the good things that take me back to simpler times. From music I listened to in high school to rewatching shows and movies I’ve seen a million times, I find myself afraid of albums that are out of touch with their classic roots, storylines that are dragged out, and, most of all, ruined or incomplete endings. I know I’m biased, but something is definitely lost in this day and age, and it’s an affront to everything I love and cherish.
There was a time when the world wasn’t at our fingertips every second of every day, and people weren’t afraid of making something for creation’s sake, bottom line be damned. But now, money and greed ruin the things I’m passionate about, and they kill creativity on the vine before it can flourish. That shift has brought on an unbearable abundance of lifeless and tone-deaf content for numb and detached people to thoughtlessly consume without a care in the world as to how they ended up here, eating up whatever slop the world sees fit to serve them.
Nothing resonates anymore, and the only solace I can find is in all my long-lost favorite things.The arts used to have life, color, and clear and moving beginnings, middles, and ends. They had the power to fulfill you, to leave you with the right amount of wanting to keep you thinking and talking about it for years to come. Now they literally tell you everything, distract you with the visuals, and call it the blockbuster film of the summer—or the best TV battle in cinematic history.
Does nobody else see that’s just bad storytelling? Why don’t stories matter anymore? I thought that this was the foundational piece that makes good art in all forms? Where has meaning in anything gone? Why don’t we care when we get duped, when the executives destroy the vision and heart of a promising project for the sake of their profit margins? These people—assuming it’s not too generous to call them people—who know nothing of the creative process take the soul out of something they never understood, and they never learn because the box office numbers and viewership are all they care about.
It doesn’t matter if nobody likes it after they were tricked into buying a movie ticket or convinced to tune in, misled on the premise or the overall quality of something to the point where they give it the awful review it deserves. Nobody listens, and the ones like me who miss quality content and moving experiences are left feeling hollow and hopeless as we wait for the rest of the world to wake up and realize that authentic art matters. It tells the stories of truths and legends we have lost, it gives us hope when it feels like there’s none, it excites us, and it moves us to tears, to fear, and beyond words. It inspires us to do something meaningful, to put something bigger than ourselves out into the world without fear or apology, and it’s the collective soul that binds us, and that soul has died.
All that’s left is emptiness, confusion, and anger as we argue until we’re blue in the face with people who don’t get it and wait for a revival of all those things we used to love. If we’re lucky, we become inspired to do something about it ourselves and the cycle is reborn, in a new age of beautiful creativity and human experience.