Please bare with me on the writing style of this blog post. I try to stay stone-faced professional when I write these, unless it is pure comedy like with my Top Ten Things You Can Do In Naughty Bear post. This one is not a pure comedy, however, this one has a more blunt and personal feeling and I think speaking the way I normally would (barring curse words) is the best way to get this point across.
As of only a few minutes before I started writing this post, I went through my rather long list of YouTube subscriptions. I have had a YouTube account for many years, and with the account I have both created my own videos to help promote myself, and watched content for almost every day of my life for the past few years. There are several channels I still watch often, and some of them are channels I only recently started watching. This content ranges from Let's Plays, deep frying multiple foods, podcasts, animation, video essays, and other notable styles.
If you had asked me only a few months ago, I could have gone on much longer.
I made the mistake of not counting how many subscriptions I had before, but I have since unsubscribed from a great deal of channels I used to watch all the time. I no longer like videos such as movie reviews where the person just recaps the whole film and adds jokes or pointless pop culture references to eighties kid's films. My patience has worth thin for many half-hour videos I used to set aside time for. While I am willing to wait for a product I really like to release a new episode, I have also decided that some of them are taking far too long compared to my personal investment and interest. To put things in a retrospective for just how many videos I do not care about anymore, I also just reduced the amount of videos in my "watch later" list. The number used to be almost two-hundred, now it is only seventy-three, and a few of the videos I left in had a good deal of hesitation.
Funnily enough, the deleting of over half my "watch later" list came from me looking at it and basically saying the true yet cliched line of "I'm not going to live forever". My head was sick of the fact I was never going to actually watch most of these videos in my too short lifetime, and in doing so, I further questioned if I really cared about what I was admitting I wouldn't watch. Most of the videos that were scrapped came from channels I decided to unsubscribe from. Granted, there were some channels I am still subscribed to and still love that also created videos I deleted from my list, but in many of those cases it boiled down to the fact that I still liked other content they made but no longer liked the kind of content I chose to delete.
Online content is not the only art form I now have different opinions on.
I would like to admit that this and the previous year is the first time in a long time I started reading for pleasure again. My reading choices varied from classics, to unheard of, and to everything in-between. My time reading again not only reminded me of just how much reading is, but I discovered that for the first time in my life, I really love the murder-mystery genre. I used to hate it. I used to think it was cliched, either completely predictable or so unpredictable that it made no sense , or they were just plain boring. And yet after reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I have been going in and out of phases were all I watch or read is murder mysteries. Even bad ones catch my attention and interest.
This sudden genre-love was not my only discovery. During my time reading again; I have fallen in-and-out of love with J.K. Rowling's style (Loved Casual Vacancy, thought Cuckoo's Calling was way too long and padded,), I have gotten closer to liking super-heroes other than Spider-man, and I've outright grown a respect for literature that is far stronger than the one I used to have. That is saying something considering my career is "writer".
After graduating college last December, I took this year to relax and take in all the art and media I didn't have to time for before. I never expected to learn so many things about myself and my personal tastes. Some things are still true; I still love crime-dramas, I still love realism, I still think satire is the hardest and highest form of comedy, and I'm still completely disinterested in high fantasy.
And yet there are many things that aren't the same anymore. I went from regretting that I had a list of video games I never finished, to realizing that there are many good reasons to not finish certain games. I went from being the kind of person to argue that story-telling in video games is more important than gameplay, to realizing that there were too many examples of a good or great narrative being undermined by the fact the controls were nothing short of awful. I have realized that even though it remains my least favorite genre, there are many country songs I genuinely enjoy.
The real funny thing about this, is that I always knew this could happen for things you liked or disliked as a child or early teen. I have always encouraged people to re-watch shows they loved as a kid, to see if it held up to their expectations or not. I've heard too many people defend something with "I loved that as a kid!", meaning they could very well be defending something they don't even actually like anymore as they haven't given it a watch as an adult. I also very recently re-watched the entire CatDog series and discovered a show I thought I didn't care about was in fact very entertaining to me.
We are often told, and just as often talk about, how we become different people as we grow. We even discuss how our literal taste buds change as we get older. Children don't tend to care for vegetables and no one likes beer the first time, that sort of thing. I am very much a different person than I was only a few years ago. Still, I never, never suspected that I would so quickly grow out of something. The very stuff I appreciated everyday of my college life, I now find unfunny and uninteresting only one year after my graduation. I take no regret in my former interests, but it is shocking to look at something I spent so much time admiring, and having to admit it was basically just a phase I was going through. I also never expected to go through phases as a full grown adult man, but I guess those can be more mature than we're often led to believe.
You know, when I was a kid, I hated mint. It disgusted me as a flavor, it killed anything it touched. Now I think mint is one of the most delicious flavors I've ever tried, and I think it goes good with everything. When I was a kid, I thought Tiny Toon Adventures was a good show, and now it's one of my favorites because I know understand so many animation in-jokes that they snuck in, blatantly or otherwise. When I was a kid, I liked the Teletubbies, and I don't need to tell you the utter disdain I have for that show as an adult.
You want to know something else though? In high school, I hated Dr. Pepper. I do mean the cola, in case that is the name of an actual person or a TV show or something. For years, I've wanted to buy it and see if my taste buds are different. See if I'd like it now. I feel it's worth doing, even if it would have been less than ten years ago when I hated it. Seeing how fast I've grown out of media I loved in college, maybe I should revisit some things I used to not like five or six years ago. I remember thinking The Graduate was boring, maybe I'll understand it now. I remember thinking Jaws was a chore to sit through, maybe current me thinks it's a suspenseful experience like I always did with Alien.
What I'm saying is, I think it may be important to find your Dr. Pepper. Something you remember having a strong opinion on, but can't shake the fact it may be different now.
My title for this post is still a question, and I guess I should try to answer it. The truth is, it really just confuses me that said tastes can still shift so hard later in life. I know that I like different things than I did as a child. I know that my early teens have little impact on my tastes in adulthood. I don't understand why there are things I enjoyed as an adult, that I almost despise one year later. I understand growing as a person, I can understand having a completely different personality even after a short amount of time, there are too many life experiences to list that can that to you. I just don't see a reason why my artistic taste buds have to have a drastic change again. I don't think I'll ever again like the stuff that helped keep a smile on my face during college's hard times, and I don't get why.
Sometimes your favorite movies are removed from the list when more come along. Sometimes a growing problem with a TV show makes you give up on watching the newer seasons. And I guess, sometimes you just sit down and go "I don't like this anymore and I don't think I ever will again".
I don't know what to tell you in this case. Things change, even in the span of a year. You can devote a good chunk of your time to something you won't care about anymore down the line. Again, there is no regret for me in this, I will still cherish the time I spent caring about something. It's just weird to live in a world where that can be the only positive thing to say about something you adored not that long ago.