Look at your queue right now. Look at the movies you have saved, the books sitting on your nightstand, the albums you’ve promised yourself you’ll sit down and really listen to.
If you are like most people who care about culture, that list is a museum. It is a pantheon of heavy hitters. It is a collection of things that won awards, that topped year-end lists, that your smartest friends swore would change your life.
It is intimidating as hell.
And that is exactly why, on a random Tuesday night when you have two hours of free time, you look at that list, feel a mild sense of exhaustion, and end up re-watching The Office or The Sopranos for the fifth time.
We are living under the Tyranny of the Masterpiece.
The 10/10 Problem
In the algorithm era, everything we are pushed to consume is either algorithmic junk food designed to hijack our attention for 15 seconds, or it is A Monumental Work of Art. There is very little room left for the middle.
Because time feels so scarce, and because the sheer volume of content is so overwhelming, we have developed a collective anxiety around wasting our time. If a movie doesn't have a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, is it even worth putting on? If a book hasn't won a Pulitzer or gone viral on TikTok, why bother starting it?
We only want the 10/10s. The undeniable classics.
But a masterpiece is heavy. A masterpiece demands your full attention. You can’t fold laundry while watching a masterpiece. You can’t casually flip through a dense, generation-defining novel right before falling asleep. Masterpieces require an emotional and intellectual down payment that we rarely have the bandwidth to make at the end of a long workday.
So, the masterpieces sit in the queue. They wait for "the right time." The right time, of course, never comes.
In Defense of the 7/10
We have forgotten the absolute joy of the 7/10.
Taste is not formed by exclusively consuming the greatest works ever created by human hands. If all you ever eat is Michelin-starred tasting menus, your palate actually becomes quite narrow.
True taste—the weird, idiosyncratic, specific preferences that make you you—is formed in the margins. It is formed by watching a sci-fi thriller from 1998 that has terrible CGI but a fascinating central premise. It is formed by reading a debut novel where the pacing is a mess but the dialogue is so sharp you highlight half the book. It is formed by listening to a band's awkward second album where they tried something new and failed, but failed interestingly.
The 7/10 is where you find yourself.
When you consume something flawed, you have to actively engage with it. You have to decide what you liked and what you didn't. You can say, "The ending completely fell apart, but the world-building in the first act was incredible." That distinction—that ability to separate the good from the bad and find value in the wreckage—is the very definition of developing taste.
When you consume a masterpiece, the work does the heavy lifting for you. When you consume something messy, you do the work.
The Museum vs. The Diary
The problem with how we use digital lists—our watchlists, our reading lists, our saves—is that we treat them like public museums. We curate them for an imagined audience, trying to prove that we have good, sophisticated taste.
But a collection shouldn't be a museum. It should be a diary.
Your shelves shouldn't just reflect what critics think is important; they should reflect what you found interesting. They should be littered with guilty pleasures, bizarre hyper-fixations, and flawed experiments that captured your imagination for a weekend.
When you look back at your history of consumption, the masterpieces will stand out, yes. But the odd, messy, perfectly average things you experienced along the way will tell a much better story about who you were at that moment in time.
Lower the Stakes
So, here is a proposal: lower the stakes.
Tonight, do not watch the three-hour critically acclaimed foreign film that has been sitting at the top of your queue for six months. Do not read the massive historical biography you feel obligated to finish.
Pick something that looks just okay. Pick something that has a weird poster, or an actor you kind of like, or a premise that sounds slightly absurd. Give yourself permission to consume something that is not trying to change the world.
You might hate it. You might turn it off after twenty minutes. Or, you might find a specific, strange, completely un-award-winning moment of brilliance that stays with you for the rest of your life.
The masterpiece will still be there tomorrow. Go find something messy today.