ITYSKA #4: Rewatch and Replay, Over and Over
We have a tendency to rewatch a lot of our favorite media over and over again. Why?
What I've been doing recently is going back to some of the media I've consumed back in the day. Last year, the first book I read and finished was The Great Gatsby, a book I read back when I was in high school. Currently, I’m going back to and rereading Donna Tartt's The Secret History, a book I read last year as well. I have also been rewatching some of the TV shows and movies I watched years back, replaying a few video games that I miss playing, and relistening to albums, both on vinyl and through streaming. I’m pretty sure most of you reading this have revisited your favorite pieces of media as well.
Why do we have a tendency to replay some of our favorite pieces of media? One study suggests that when we experience something new, whether it's our first trip to a new place or the uncertain experience of watching a new movie, we feel overwhelmed, but upon our second or even third time revisiting it, we have a tendency to find things we overlooked on our first watch. Tim Urban, blogger of Wait But Why, suggests that we tend to relisten to songs more often than films because once we know how the plot goes after the first go around, we find the second outing less exciting. The opposite is true with music, once our brain memorizes a song, the song carves a special pathway in our heads and there's a great sense of pleasure in having that pathway lit up. He also notes that films aren't just plot, they're also a piece of art. Sometimes rewatching a film can be like going to your favorite museum for the second or third time. One of Naval Ravikant's many pieces of advice is to reread the 100 best books over and over again, that way you can fully understand the finer points the book is making and skip the parts that feel the less relevant to you.
The point I'm making here is that there’s something novel about visiting the similar. Yes, you have a full glimpse of the characters, you know the twists and turns, and how it’s all going to end, but then you notice things that you did not notice on your first go-around. You notice the subtle bits of foreshadowing, certain parts that don’t make sense upon first viewing suddenly do make sense upon rewatch. All of a sudden the parts are colored and covered like a map. At the same time, however, it’s not just the piece of art that’s changed, it’s also you. Hopefully, you’re not the same person you were one, two or ten years ago. To quote the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” I encourage everyone to revisit their favorite pieces of media and see how much the media and your self have changed.
🏫Online School and Community I’ve Been A Part of: As I’ve mentioned in my introduction post, I have been a part of the Online Synthesizers Skool ever since March (the misspelling is intentional btw). The purpose of the school and community is to help users consume content more intentionally, curate the best types of content out there, and create content based on what they’ve curated.
Basically, it’s the cycle of Consume → Curate → Create.
This group of people who do this are called Synthesizers and it’s a community that encourages accountability when it comes to the habit of doing all three of the above things. Their job is to sort out the gigantic sea of content that fills up the internet space, pick out the ones with the highest quality of information, and share it with others. It’s the internet equivalent of dumpster diving, and I’m happy to dig to find treasure, the treasure being valuable, interesting online content. If any of this piques your curiosity, you can learn more here.
📚Books I’ve Read: I finished reading The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers and it’s about the adventures of a space crew on a ship called the Wayfarer as they explore the galaxy. It’s a pretty episodic book that focuses a lot on characterization and world-building. The most noteworthy thing about the book is how sincere the tone is. The topic of sincerity has been swirling around my head for a good while now and I could write a post on it at some point. Back to the novel, it’s pretty heartfelt for a sci-fi series and the chapters are more like episodes with a clear message in each one with the overall theme of the entire book being that everyone is weird in their own way and that no one is perfect and it’s how those imperfections make us unique and that there’s a sense of humanity in all of us. If you want to read sci-fi series that’s more on the sincere side, this is probably for you. I do have plans on reading more of the series in the near future so expect more mini-thoughts/reviews on them soon.
I have also read, or rather listened to the audiobook version, Out of the Silent Planet by CS Lewis. Yes, the same author who wrote the Chronicles of Narnia. It’s a sci-fi story about a philologist named Elwin Ransom who gets abducted to a planet called Malachandra and he has to escape. Because this is a CS Lewis story, there are also discussions of theology and colonialism as well. Quite the interesting sci-fi book and CS Lewis also wrote two sequels to it: Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. I will listen to those on audiobook as well.
📝 Most Interesting Articles I’ve Come Across: When it comes to building good habits, we often overfill our plate and try to bite off more than we could chew. If you don’t want to do too much too soon, the question is less “What should I do?” and more “What should I not do?” The Not To-Do List: 9 Habits to Stop Now by none other than Tim Ferriss should help you add more time and space to your day. It’s a short but helpful list that can help reclaim your time and be more productive.
Keeping up with the theme of habits, once you get rid of bad habits and make room for new ones, that brings us to the next question: why should we build good habits in the first place? Why should we care about what habits to build? Habits are, for better or for worse, what make us who we are. Our actions are who we are and who we want to be in our lives. What path we take in life determines what experiences we get in life, both good and bad. One path is the path of mastery. My fellow writer Joao Dias over at his Substack Attraction Flow wrote a piece on How Mastery Allows You To Take Control Over Your Life! The article discusses self-mastery and skill mastery and how they relate to habits. Give it a read and subscribe to his Substack.
Finally, another blogger I want to showcase is Arjun Khemani. He’s only 15 years old and yet a lot of his articles are filled with ancient wisdom. If you want a glimpse at how well thought out his articles can be, I encourage people to read An Unconventional View of Happiness. It’s the article that made me want to read more from him and he explains what we get tend to get wrong when it comes to happiness. Happiness is a topic that has been of interest to me ever since my University days and a lot of the ideas (but not all of them) are similar to what I’ve read in the past. If you want a fairly lengthy primer on happiness, this would be a great starting point.
📹Videos worth watching: Starting with a video on the longer, the first video is an hour 18-minute video on the rise and fall of the Britpop band Oasis. I was never the biggest Oasis fan out there. But then again, I didn’t grow up in the UK in the 90s, and when I was getting into Oasis, they were pretty much past their prime. They were completely done in the States and, at best, had a cult following elsewhere. For those who want to know Oasis rose up so quickly and an even quicker exit from the mainstream this video The Agony and the Ecstacy: BE HERE NOW - Oasis’s 3rd Album Ruined Them is a fantastically in-depth look on their rise and fall.
Semi-related to this, who gets to determine what art means? Does the intention of the artist matter at all? Or does art indeed belong to the eye of the beholder? Those questions are asked in this 4-minute TED video. Hear all the perspectives from art critics and philosophers and decide for yourself.
The final video I want to show is called Why The Rich Man Drives a Cheap Car, written and spoken by Kapil Gupta, author and personal advisor to pro athletes, CEOs, and celebs. Despite being 9 minutes and 45 seconds, it’s a pretty heady listen and will challenge your perception of what it means to be rich and poor.
🫁Have you tried breathing?: According to this study by the University of Colorado published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, 5-Minute breathing exercises lowers blood pressure as much as exercise and drugs. More details on the methodology and implications are in the link, but regardless, this is a pretty exciting endeavor. As someone who has read James Nestor’s book Breath, it’s great to see people taking the simple action of breathing and seeing it as a gateway to having better health conditions.
🎵Vinyl Record Update: It’s been a while since I’ve updated the list of vinyl records I have collected. If you’re curious about what my first ten records were, please check out the very first ITYSKA blog I wrote. Ever since then, I have collected twelve more records, giving me grand total of twenty-two records. The first picture is a collection of records I collected at various points through my local record store, online, and GoodWill.
And here is my haul from Record Store Day, an event dedicated to local record stores where they sell records exclusive to that day.
I have a lot to say about music, vinyl records, and why this seemingly dead and dated technology suddenly became relevant again. I have plans on writing a blog post on it. I also have plans on making it exclusive to paid subscribers since it's outside my monthly newsletter. Be forewarned that if you do want to read it, you'll have to pay for it to read the whole thing.
🧼What happens to used hotel soap?: One final piece for this newsletter. If you’ve ever been to a hotel, you know that there’s a special brand of hotel soap. Anyone who has ever left a hotel has also probably taken the hotel soap. My family and I admit to doing this when visiting a hotel, though it’s a perfectly acceptable thing to do according to hotel workers. But for those who choose not to bring the hotel bar soap with them, what actually happens to them after they’re used? As it turns out, a lot of them actually get reused and recycled and are used to help countries in need. There’s an organization that helps picks up a lot of that used bar soap and instead of putting them in a landfill, it gets a second life as life-saving soap that helps a person in need. You can read more about it in The Surprising Afterlife of Used Hotel Soap. It’s an incredibly inspiring story of how someone can identify a problem, make a business out of it, and have a massive global impact. I hope the article inspires you to do well effectively as well.
That’s it for this month’s edition of Interesting Things You Should Know About. I would greatly appreciate it if you subscribe to this newsletter and share it with those who would find it helpful and useful. There will be a lot more stuff planned in the future. I have a lot more content I want to share with you and ideas for articles I want to write. As I’ve alluded to before, there will be content exclusive to paid subscribers in the future, so if you want to support me monetarily, I would love that. It won’t cost you that much to read my paywalled articles, I promise you that.
Thank you for reading, and remember, stay interesting!