I’ve been trying to live more intentionally lately. It’s why I started this Substack again. Slower mornings. Less social media. Less notifications. Actually finishing one thing before starting another. It’s the kind of gentle life optimisation that fills Pinterest boards and sells candles. But there’s one area where the universe seems determined to thwart me: watching television. Not the watching itself, but the timing. The pressure. The unspoken rule that if you haven’t seen something the moment it drops, you’ve somehow failed at being a cultural participant. And if you haven’t watched it yet? Well, prepare to have every plot point surgically extracted, explained and delivered to you whether you asked for it or not.
“Spoilers!” River Song would cry, hand raised theatrically, refusing to let the Doctor glimpse his own future. It became a catchphrase, a meme, a cultural shorthand for information we’re not yet ready to receive. But the research suggests she might have had it backwards. A 2011 study by Leavitt and Christenfeld at UC San Diego found that participants actually enjoyed stories more when they knew the ending in advance. Spoilers, don’t spoil anything, apparently, they free us from the anxiety of not knowing and let us appreciate the craft of the telling. It lets us watch for the foreshadowing, the weight of every interaction, and see how good the storytelling is.
But there’s a difference between choosing to know and having it thrown at you as soon as you wake up. When the Stranger Things finale aired, the ending was plastered everywhere within minutes, not days, minutes. Even the BBC has been posting real-time Traitors spoilers as episodes have come out, as if everyone in Britain had synchronised their viewing schedules. Even the platforms became the spoilers themselves. It’s not about whether knowing enhances enjoyment; it’s about the choice. About having the choice to engage on your own terms. It feels to me like when the choice is taken away, the story stops being yours to discover.
We’re told that modern television is designed for “two-screen viewing” (at least, this is what I heard from Richard Osman in a 30 second clip of a podcast I consumed while scrolling). Scripts are being written with the assumption that audiences will be scrolling, sharing, and reacting in real time. But what if we don’t want to? What if I’d rather watch something with my full attention, not performing my reactions for an invisible audience? The expectation of constant connectivity isn’t neutral. It privileges a particular kind of viewer: always available, always online, always ready to participate in the collective experience at precisely the moment it’s offered.
Because what about those of us who simply can’t? Who have work schedules that don’t align with Friday night drops? Who have children to put to bed, or caring responsibilities, or just a bone-deep tiredness that means Saturday morning is the earliest we can manage? The assumption that everyone can watch everything immediately is in itself exclusionary. It creates a hierarchy of viewers: those who consume on demand, and those perpetually playing catch-up, dodging spoilers like landmines.
The conversation around Wicked felt different somehow. Perhaps because the musical has existed for two decades. The songs are cultural furniture. Knowing Elphaba’s fate doesn’t diminish the film, it’s the point of it. There’s a generosity in adaptations of beloved material: the ending is already shared knowledge, so the discussion becomes about interpretation rather than revelation. No one was frantically muting keywords or avoiding group chats. We could simply, watch it when we were ready.
So how do we live more slowly, more intentionally, when the world seems to conspire against it? I don’t have a perfect answer. Sorry. I’m still figuring it out myself. But I’m starting by refusing to feel guilty about not keeping up. Muting aggressively and without apology. Reminding myself that a story will still be there next week, next month, whenever I’m ready to receive it. Capitalism wants urgency. It profits from that fear of mising out, from the anxiety of missing out, from the fear that we’ll be left behind. But urgency is just another word for anxiety wearing productivity’s clothing. Another word capitalism hides behind. And I’m trying, slowly and imperfectly, to opt out, to reclaim the pace of my own attention, one unmuted notification at a time.
And figure out how to rest without feeling guilty. Figure out how to switch off. And see watching tv as “productive” as reading. To see any point where we switch off, as radical defiance.