#pop-culture

About a month ago, I started listening to The Joe Rogan Experience.

I had somehow gone its entire existence without really listening to it. I started with a few recent episodes, liked them well enough, and then decided to do something slightly unreasonable: go back to the beginning.

So lately I have been listening to episodes recorded around late 2009 and early 2010.

I was a freshman in high school then.

The strange thing is how little distance I sometimes feel between that world and this one.

Someone will mention a movie, a musician, a television show, a celebrity, some weird thing that happened in the news, and immediately I remember it. Not merely the thing itself, either. I remember talking about it.

I remember conversations in hallways, at lunch, after school, online. I remember what my friends thought. I remember jokes that came from things everyone had seen. I remember arguments over music, movies and whatever happened to be going on that week.

I hadn’t realized how much of my memory of that period was made of conversations about things.

And listening to those old episodes has made me realize something else:

I hardly have those conversations anymore.

That is not because pop culture disappeared.

There may be more culture available now than at any other point in human history. There are more movies, more television shows, more musicians, more podcasts, more writers, more videos and more things to pay attention to than anyone could consume in a lifetime.