Home Theater
Nowadays, I have much more home theatrics than I do home theater. Despite having access to multiple large screen TVs, they’re almost never turned on and when they are, it’s for short programming. Instead, the best entertainment comes from watching the kids engage in some make belief.
When they are ready to come together to watch something longer, they can almost never decide on the movie or, if they do decide, lose patience or get scared half way through. Movie night is more about eating popcorn covered in whatever candies they can find.
In my day, six year old me sat through the 1988 re-release of Bambi and experienced his mom getting roasted in forest fire. I never complained about it. Nowadays, kids are being dopamine pumped with YouTube Shorts. Mr. Beast gets to the point in about 10 seconds. Otherwise, nobody likes or subscribes.
So what will the home theater equivalent be for the next generation? A place to interact with VR? A yoga studio? Maybe even a mini studio for creating content?
Sitting down for a two hours stretch for a single piece of content is unlikely unless we cultivate it. Maybe it’s something kids grow into. We’ve had success with the long-form podcast but only because that is something that can be done while multitasking. For video, we still need an alternative or within a generation, it might be only for the old.
