On Slop
Inane, directionless ranting on the new entertainments
However short and flight-prone we know time to be, there remains an awful lot of it to fill. Although my own personal free time has reached record-breaking lows as of late, I am still struggling with what exactly to do with myself during it.
Perhaps I am simply out of practice - 2026 has, thus far, been a largely-relentless onslaught of responsibility and necessity which has left me precious few opportunities to founder in unscheduled time - but I am finding that most self-guided recreation1 seems to lack the nutritional value it once held.
These are the potato chip hours. These are the minutes which only pass by forced march through every lone second. These are those moments in which you wish that you had to go the bathroom because that would, at the very least, be something to do.
This feeling - true boredom - is not at all without merit. The bizarre urgency with which we seek to flee idleness has likely spurred on countless developments for humanity; in some way, restlessness likely inspired everything from fire to flight to frisbee. On the other hand, there is also immense spiritual and psychological growth to be had when one learns to accept boredom and be comfortable to do nothing for a while beyond simply exist.
With that said: we are likely but 5 to 10 years away from a pharmaceutical solution. This will either conduct the neurological equivalent of a drone strike on those synapses which beget discontent, or instead perfectly stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain as like fellatio from God. In the meantime, to sate our need to feel something other than how we do when there is nothing to do, there is slop.
Slop exists solely to meet appetite without catering to taste. Slop is cheap, quick, and easy to produce. Slop can be made using older, uneaten slop, as new slop can be added to the leavings in the slop-trough where the notions of ‘old’ versus ‘new’ dissolve into the homogenous vagaries of slop. So slop was for pigs, so slop now is for us.
Our slop does not require a thinking mind to produce or consume it: slop can be created, flogged, and slurped up by a machine all on its own. Slop is everywhere, and slop is constant. Even if you don’t suck down slop on purpose, you will trod in slop while on your way to something else, and a little bit of slop will dribble into your brain through your eye like heavy rain somehow finds it way under your jacket.
It is easy to talk down upon the ones drinking from the slop-trough. I am doing so now by referring to them as such, for it gives me a little tingle of superiority and pleasant unclenching sensation in the ego. However, I only feel qualified to speak on slop as I myself have clocked many an hour at the trough.
I used to confuse boredom for hunger. That’s a bit of an oversimplification - I was depressed, and didn’t yet have the tools to reckon with how I felt beyond a too-deep appreciation for how good eating felt in the present tense - but it works for the slop allegory. I am deeply thankful that I managed my boredom-appetite before technology progressed to the point where AI Will Smith could convincingly eat pasta2.
There has long been a market for your attention, and an earnest desire to sell it. Your grandparents’ may have been sold and sold to early television sets and the radio, where their grandparents’ may have been to parlor games or serialized Dickens novels or 'a classic game of ‘hoop-and-stick’ or something. This all feels rather quaint given how rapidly play has evolved - you can, with a whim and a single-digit caloric expense of finger movement, access essentially the sum total of human knowledge or play god in any number of virtual worlds.
I don’t draw this comparison to hawk some tired, anti-technology, throw-your-phone-in-the-ocean-and-return-to-simplicity talking point - rather, just to invite you
(perhaps glancing up from your other screen, where AI Patrick Bateman and AI Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson might be in the midst of acting out uncanny pantomimes of narrative (perhaps the two had welcomed and just tragically lost a baby, which happens, for some unknown reason, to be a cat-person, or some such similar feverish nightmare ripped premature from the collective un-and-non-conscious hallucinations of the deranged machine-mind (itself like Yeats’ “rough beast” was hurried along too soon in its slouching towards existence by moneyed maniacs (themselves richer than Mansa Musa in stock options and defense contracts awarded to them by a government they paid unfathomable amounts to change (for, when you have billions, just the will to power and an utter lack of morals is enough to overcome the total lack of charisma and human decency and skip democracy outright to actively drive international anti-humanitarian upheaval solely for personal gain) just to add another zero to their net worth) seeking to supplant the arts with soulless artifice) which, despite its utter lack of humanity, I cannot help but pity as if it is the suffering child from Omelas instead enabling a dystopia) for nothing more than your viewing pleasure)
to give yourself a little grace should your recent attempts at relaxation have felt anything but.
This excludes the interpersonal, the productive, and the bodily - there is intrinsic fulfillment in spending time with friends and loved ones; in self-improvement and contributing towards personal projects; in the release of endorphins or the taste of good food and drink - and instead explicitly refers to the occasions in which one is alone, between meals, social engagements, or times for meaningful work, and has truly nothing to do.