You Are Your Cultural Diet
How consumption transforms you.
I place my tower of books on the counter. Six books. A humble, respectable number. A number that says, I read, but I also floss and blink and touch grass.
“What’s the limit again? Is it six or eight? I always forget.”
The librarian laughs a little, but in a way that suggests he has seen the abyss and knows I will not survive it.
“It’s a hundred.”
“A hundred?”
He scans my card. “Yeah.”
“Wow. Why would you need that many books at once?” I ask, stunned. A hundred books. A hundred! I hadn’t considered a hundred.
“Maybe if you have kids or something.”
I nod, as if this makes sense. It does not.
Who will read a hundred books in three weeks?
The kid thing raises more questions than it answers. I have known children. I was one. Children like reading the same book 17 times. The only plausible scenario I can imagine for 100 library books is a person constructing an elaborate book fort in which to die in 2025.
Outside, I think about that number. About how reading, with the advent of BookTok and the rise of the Online Personality as Book Girl, has become something closer to a competitive sport. Not to mention the fact that every hot famous woman now has a book club, each one suggesting that the answer to your existential despair (and thigh definition) lies somewhere between Joan Didion and Just Kids.
A hundred books in three weeks? Deranged.
But a hundred books in a year? No longer extraordinary.
Never mind that no one wants to talk about the density of said books and whether they were truly metabolized or just came and went without leaving so much as a bruise.
I know I should tread lightly here. We are never to interrogate. The moment someone suggests that 100 books with cartoon people holding hands on the cover in ice skates is not quite the same as Dostoevsky, a hush falls over the room. The Emily Henry battalion begin sharpening their machetes and preparing liturgies on the importance of female-centric art. A man in a turtleneck emerges from the shadows to declare that real reading is biographies of Winston Churchill and books with titles like The Tenacity of Iron: Why Men Who Wake Up at 4 AM Are Simply Better. A bloodbath ensues, one that ends with someone saying “art is subjective” and begins with me leaving the room.
But what it is you’re reading does matter, just like what you’re listening to, looking at, and watching.
Cultural diets don’t just offer ideas, information, and entertainment—they shape our personalities as much as our own lived experiences. The question of “what are you consuming?” is deceptively massive and not just in a High Fidelity, record shop snob kind of way. And I don’t mean the obvious stuff, like getting radicalized by Noam Chomsky or Luigi’s Goodreads account. This isn’t about taste-policing or performative intellectualism. I don’t even mean using culture to signal identity, although culture certainly forms it.
I mean that if you watched The Office every day for a year, your life would feel fundamentally different than if you did the same with Severance. Both are about corporate life, but one makes you cozy while the other makes you alert, uneasy. One has a loveable idiot boss played by Steve Carell, charming in his lack of boundaries. The other features liminal spaces, sparse dialogue, and a sense of impending doom that quietly suggest your job might be erasing your soul. What you take in—whether it goes down smooth or sticks in your throat—alters the way you move through the world.
So why would someone choose the one that makes them feel worse? (Let’s take signaling out of the equation). Is the instant mood-booster or the cerebral downer the better long-term investment? Does easy comfort dull us over time, or does relentless challenge wear us down? And if both shape us in different ways, can we offset one with the other—build a “balanced diet” of art, where the fluff cushions the blows and the heavy stuff keeps us from floating away?
—
From my library stack, I dive into Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter. It’s bleak, claustrophobic, relentless. It moves fast, drilling into millennial ambition, late-stage capitalism, and tech startup culture. I don’t like how it’s making me feel, but I can’t put it down. I develop a vague resentment toward the sameness of weekdays. I suddenly wonder which tones of politeness are a form of corporate codeswitching. I feel a fresh hostility toward fleece half zips, Allbirds, and IPAs. All this, and I don’t even work a corporate job.
Milk Fed is next. It’s packed with combustible material—disordered eating, maternal narcissism, sexuality, religion, the whole psychic minefield! And yet, Melissa Broder writes like a stand-up comic. The humanity she excavates from the mess is delivered with so much reckless honesty, it’s oddly fun. Suddenly, I’m giving everyone more of a break. I can make light of things more easily. But I’m also thinking about why I chose that for lunch. Broder presents food as a reflection of discipline or pleasure, control or surrender, years of familial conditioning baked into every bite for her protagonist.
In just these two experiences, I am two slightly different people, reshaped by 300 pages. So what about the films I watch, the podcasts I listen to, the images fed to me on my Discover page? The latter feels the most crucial because it’s the most insidious. I didn’t choose those. They chose me.
I bring this up with the barista at my coffee shop when she asks me what I’m writing. She’s a theater actress–she just played Beth in a production of Little Women and had to die on stage. I don’t know why this detail is important but I think it really paints a picture of her emotional range. Also this is a way of saying I respect her, even if I don’t respect the director’s choices.
Anyway, I mention this idea, the cultural diet. It’s just a seed at the time. It feels relevant on the heels of the inauguration: how do you stay informed but take care of yourself? Limit your news consumption and enjoy something frothy but stop short of giving yourself a full lobotomy in the process.
The next day, having slept on it, she brings up sitcoms. She watched a lot of them during lockdown because the story stakes were so low and every conflict neatly wrapped by the end of the episode. The jokes were easy, smartphones didn’t exist, even the warm grain invoked simpler times. A sense of comfort in the deeply uncomfortable, high-stakes, and unresolved global pause. Sitcoms sustained a lot of people in 2020, even if some of you psychos chose Tiger King instead.
My lockdown sampler platter was
, Dolly Alderton, and Pema Chödrön—in other words, life-affirming advice-givers whose writing felt like warm tea. Pair that with my newfound obsession with working out and eating healthy (I was basically that 4 AM guy from earlier) and I could cope. I was centered and calm, all things considered. That was until I fired up The Sopranos, trying to address a cultural blind spot, which had the opposite effect.I have a friend who starts her day with The Today Show and finishes with The Tortured Poet’s Department. She loves Amy Schumer. She was one of 23 people who bought a ticket for Argylle starring Dua Lipa and emerged saying “it wasn’t bad!” She has no idea what I’m talking about when I say the words Bong Joon Ho.
She is, notably, much less anxious than I am.
I’ve attempted her levity technique, particularly during dark global moments like this one. It doesn’t work for me. I get distracted. I get bored. I feel like I’m wasting my time. There’s something malevolent about that level of sweetness and ease, personally (see:
’s Cringe Matrix).But a Robert Eggers or Ari Aster joint? The Ti West trilogy? That’s home! My friend Rachael frequently asks me to screen films like Nosferatu to determine if they’ll be too scary for her. Babe, I am a bad litmus test! Suspiria (2018) is how I relax after a long day.
I ask myself constantly why I’m drawn to such detachedness. Have I built up such a tolerance for the dark, the dense, the disquieting that anything meant to comfort or affirm now feels too benign, too earnest? I really tried to pick something easy at the library—and somehow, I reached for Tender Is the Flesh. Am I okay?
But there’s more at play here. Culture and art don’t exist in binaries—intense vs. comforting, prestige vs. broad, easy vs. challenging, mainstream vs. underground, formulaic vs. experimental, even female vs. male.
No, of course they don’t.
There’s such specificity in the feeling something evokes—so precise, so singular, that it can only be an extension of the artist themselves. Unreplicable, just as they are. It’s in the world-building and unspoken undercurrents. The way a piece of art doesn’t just tell a story but immerses you in a reality that could only have come from that one particular mind.
If Billie Eilish wore a Peter Pan collar and played a ukulele, she wouldn’t be winning Grammys right now, despite the strength of her music. Part of her appeal lies in the paradox: an effortlessly cool girl, dressed like a boy, singing in that soft, aching whisper. You love Billie, not just Billie’s songs. Listening to her doesn’t just make you like her music—it makes you feel a little like her. Not just because of the sound, but because it instantly conjures the world she’s built, right there inside you.
You could call this branding, but that would suggest something calculated, insincere—something an audience can sniff out from a mile away. It never works. It can be a story you’re telling, an “era” you’re in, but it can’t be a persona that isn’t some part of you. If it’s not real for you, people won’t see themselves in it. They won’t connect.
When
said that watching Tashi in Challengers gave her an attitude, I felt that in my bones.I drove differently after Furiosa.
I put on a country song post-Twisters.
I scheduled a workout class after Monkey Man.
People should consume what they like. But consumption isn’t just passive enjoyment—it’s dynamic, it answers back. You’re not just taking in calories; you’re reshaping the very organs through which you consume.
—
More reading is always a net positive. But rereading a single sentence five times, staring into the distance as it rearranges your brain chemistry (see:
describing the experience of reading Black Marxism), versus inhaling a Taylor Jenkins Reid bestseller in one night—these are so fundamentally different they might as well require separate verbs. Context matters. Martin Scorsese and I have both directed things.So maybe it’s not just about what we consume, but how we let it metabolize. Some things hit instantly—a sugar rush of pleasure or catharsis. Others sit in the gut, slow-burning, quietly reshaping the way we see the world. And neither is inherently better—it’s about knowing what you need and when. A balanced diet isn’t just highbrow vs. lowbrow; it’s recognizing that every choice has an effect. Mainlining the news may have even influenced how you voted, depending on the source. That’s a remarkable implication.
Maybe we don’t always choose the thing that feels good in the moment because we’re not just consuming to be entertained—we’re consuming to be changed. The instant mood-booster makes the day easier; the cerebral downer makes the self sharper. You can offset one with the other, but the real balance isn’t in the mix—it’s in the intention. Knowing when to take the medicine and when to take the honey. When to be challenged and when to be comforted.
Because the question isn’t just What are you watching, reading, listening to?
It’s Who is it turning you into?
“Who is it turning you into” is sooo important! What you’re consuming seeps into your mind and actions. I’ve been watching a lot of housewives lately bc I’ve been feeling overwhelmed and it’s such easy watching but I swear it’s made me more confrontational and dramatic!
i think the food metaphor you put forth really rings true. ultimately, you are what you eat, and if all you consume is what feels good immediately, which is kind of like junk food, it will have a negative effect on you. really fun read!