As a Lapsed Catholic, I Think a Part of Me Will Always Conflate Consumption With Adoration
Also known as: "What we consume, consumes us."
The Eucharist is an inherently strange ritual from an outsider’s perspective and arguably also an insider’s one. I remember when the Nicene Creed was amended from “one in Being with the Father” to “consubstantial with the Father” which led to the rediscovery of the word transubstantiation, the process of which bread and wine become body and blood.
The interpretation is that God loved us so much that He sacrificed His Only Son for us. The interpretation is that Christ loved us enough to sacrifice himself for us.
And honestly, I do think there is something there, but I am several years removed from the church. And well, as the title indicates, I had a slightly different takeaway but that’s also because I partake in very different consumption nowadays.
Media consumption, but let’s talk about standard consumption first because all of these things are etymologically and therefore philosophically related right?
I haven’t cooked consistently in several years, namely since I was diagnosed with diabetes. As an individual who needed to be very wary of carb counts lest my body would revolt, prepackaged foods (shout-out to seemingly every YouTuber’s primary sponsor these days, FACTOR) make a lot more sense for my current situation. Cooking takes time. Cooking takes effort. Cooking also takes cleaning which subsequently takes times and efforts. At this juncture, not something I can readily muster.
However, I understand the importance of food. And no, it’s not just because I watch a lot of cooking shows. Food brings people together. Food provides a common ground. And food provides nourishment and in times of crisis, my default response has, is, and will always be ensure those in crisis are being fed because taking the time to eat resets things and makes things better. Can’t fight off stress on an empty stomach.
Tangentially related to the aforementioned diabetes, but I also don’t drink. Prior to 2020, this was because I abhorred the taste of the vast majority of alcohols (there were, as always, exceptions). Post-2020, it’s because the carb count would actually kill me (and also because I still abhor the taste of the vast majority of alcohols). So for the better part of my adult life, I have been the sober friend, and I don’t mind that. I like being useful, perhaps to a fault much like Brennan Lee Mulligan.
So the conflux of all of the above is that I’m pretty sure my primary love language is shared media consumption, which I think is a convoluted, hyper-specific manifestation of quality time, acts of service, and words of affirmation and also the main topic of today’s conversation.
At its core, consumption is the means of which take energy from the external and making it internal. Consumption is a process. A matter of time and effort. And as someone who moved around a lot, media was a much easier way to connect with people than anything else because media was a fairly universal commonality. Epicurean almost. I like the word epicurean, but my media appetite is probably better characterized by words like “indiscrimate” or “voracious.”
I used to read upwards of 30 webcomics. I think I’m down to three. I do maintain an aggressively large list of television and movies, and I can also tell you the exact moment I realized how much I trusted media as a means of common ground was sophomore year in undergrad when a friend of mine told me they would not discuss television with me until I watched all of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because Buffy had been a critical benchmark for them.
And so I watched all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And all five seasons of Angel. Appropriately enough, this was right around the time Netflix and Hulu were actually things and accessing media was easy than pirating and not hampered by weird restrictions. But that experience made me understand that even asynchronous shared experiences were worth established. And I became a big fan of the Buffy-verse, and I became a bigger fan of Angel because I’m a sucker for noir, but that’s a difficult newsletter.
This would come up several years later when I dated someone for a very brief period of time in I wanna say 2016. They mentioned their favorite movie was Time Bandits. I really liked this person, so I did the only reasonable thing and purchased a physical copy of Time Bandits so I could watch this very strange, very British fantasy film with them and then make too grand of a romantic gesture about a year later, only to be reminded of this fact when Taika Waititi decided to make a whole television series based on this movie on AppleTV+. Current me knows I could have handled things better. Future me will tell that story in full detail at some point in the future I’m sure.
This would not be the last time. I have watched several hundreds if not thousands of hours televisions on the recommendation of friends and loved ones, some incredibly recently that I don’t have the emotional distance to proper narrate. I have played several thousands of a video games with folks. I have been consumed by the worlds that I consumed.
And I think part of it is what the title suggests, that I am conditioned to associate consumption with adoration. But I also think, that’s just an innate part of the human condition. The want for a shared experience, a shared emotional response, a common reference. And I’m gonna keep doing it for the better.