The lost joy of monoculture

Part of the fun of the World Cup is it felt like everyone was watching.

A group of friends enjoy the World Cup. (Photo by macniak via Getty Images)

Like most American sports fans, I find the very low scoring in soccer to be a bit vexing.¹ Despite that, I had a ton of fun watching the World Cup this summer. Our family, wearing the Scotland gear we’d picked up on spring break in Edinburgh, went to see Scotland play Morocco live, and even though Morocco was clearly playing better, it was only a 1-0 game and it felt like Scotland might equalize it at any moment. The whole stadium was on its feet the entire game, chanting and cheering. We had a blast.

But following along at home was a lot of fun, too.

Not just because the games themselves are fun, but because parasocially participating in a big event that other people were also participating in is fun.

I watched games with my son. He and I and other 11-year-olds had enthusiastic conversations about Kylian Mbappé. I was on text chains with friends about Erling Haaland, who I’m sure is very famous to actual soccer fans but I’d only heard of thanks to this tournament. The competition gave all of us fun games, but also fun memes and conversation starters. I participated in dozens of semi-ignorant conversations about the offside rule.

It would’ve been a million times less fun to live in a universe where I watched the exact same games but with nobody on the couch next to me, nobody tweeting about it, no N.B.A. podcasters doing takes about Croatian soccer, and none of my friends or relatives tuning in. Halina wrote about this phenomenon with regard to March Madness: It’s not that everyone is watching the big game, but a large enough proportion of the population is that if you opt into it, you’re opting into a communal experience. The same is true of conversation-piece books like “Yesteryear” — the quality of the specific work can be almost incidental to the quality of the larger cultural experience.

But even though the World Cup specifically is surely bigger than ever thanks to the growth of soccer outside of its European and South American homelands, a reality of the modern world is that these moments are increasingly few and far between.

The World Cup group-stage games this year averaged 5.1 million American viewers each. When I was a teenager, there was a show called “The Single Guy” that aired for two seasons and was watched by more than 16 million households per episode on average in its first season — a season that was considered a massive failure.

If you’re a person of a specific age, you know exactly what I am talking about because an objectively huge share of the American population watched “The Single Guy.” But if you’re not, you have no idea what I’m talking about because this show left no cultural footprint and no legacy and wasn’t in any way noteworthy or important.

It’s just that pop culture used to be a routinely mass phenomenon, and even when it stank, it gave everyone something to talk about.

The era of the widely watched flop

The paradoxical success/failure of “The Single Guy” (which was much more popular than any scripted show currently airing) relates to the inherently mass nature of 20th-century entertainment.

Back in the linear television days, the schedule mattered a lot. If it was Thursday night and you were a fan, as so many people were, of both “Friends” (airing at 8 p.m. on NBC) and “Seinfeld” (airing at 9 p.m. on NBC), then the odds were very high that you were also going to watch whatever NBC chose to air at 8:30 p.m. That didn’t mean the network’s goal was to just put on some dreck, though. Ideally, they could take advantage of a strong time slot to launch a new show that would become popular in its own right and could be moved to conquer some other night of the week or that might come into its own as a tentpole if one of the existing tentpoles went off the air. At a minimum, though, a show should hold its own.

What you didn’t want was “The Single Guy,” a show that despite its incredibly high viewership had millions fewer viewers than “Friends” or “Seinfeld.” Worst of all, its ratings fell as the season went on. Plenty of people who figured “I’ll check out this new show” in the fall didn’t like it. My habit was to click away and dip into a Mets or Knicks game, if available, but otherwise watch it. And it was rapidly canceled so the time slot could be repurposed. NBC tried other things there that also failed, like “Caroline in the City,” until it eventually settled on “Suddenly Susan,” a show good enough to last for four years but not good enough to have any ongoing presence today.

In most measurable respects, the entertainments on offer in this era were worse.

A lot of people were watching bad sitcoms and third-rate police procedurals. The 4:3 television screens² had terrible resolution compared with today’s sets. The convenience of streaming is undeniable, and people today are just better-matched with what they are interested in.

At a motel in Waterville, Maine, last weekend, I managed to watch Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 film “High and Low” and also a bunch of random YouTubes of dudes building fires. This is a step forward from being stuck with basic cable!

And yet in terms of broader society and human flourishing, I don’t think we judge ourselves by the quality of the videos that we watched.

I was in Waterville for a youth swim meet, and the next day involved spending a lot of time with total strangers, moms and dads of other kids in the meet. The World Cup made for good small talk. If it were 1997, the odds are good that network television would have served the same purpose. And for that purpose, “Caroline in the City” is a lot better than an old black-and-white Japanese film; I wasn’t about to launch into a conversation with strangers about why Spike Lee felt this was a good movie to remake. And yet, I really would have liked to talk to someone about that.

Communal consumption is more fun

Earlier this year, “The Mandalorian and Grogu” had a shockingly poor commercial performance for a “Star Wars” movie.

This was in part because the movie was bad. But that obviously doesn’t work as a total explanation for its commercial failure since Disney has (sad to say) put out a lot of bad “Star Wars” movies over the years. Something had just shifted in the culture in terms of people’s willingness to take a pass on a “Star Wars” release.

That being said, the marketing of the movie did make it pretty appealing to children.

So I actually wound up seeing it in the theater with my son and two other dad friends and all their kids. It was a fun time!

It was fun in part because it’s fun to see friends and in part because big groups of kids are entertaining when they’re not cranky. But it was also fun specifically to talk about the movie and other “Star Wars” movies and how it relates to everyone’s understanding of this fictional galaxy far, far away.

As a cinephile, I’m kind of glad that we’ve seen both a strong box-office year and commercial disappointment for some major franchise films. It feels like we’re entering an exciting new era in which there’s money to be made in empowering younger filmmakers and telling different kinds of stories rather than churning out more superheroes.

At the same time, if you’re someone who has affection for the “Star Wars” franchise, I promise you that going to see a “Star Wars” movie with other friends who also like “Star Wars” and then talking about the movie will be a good time even if the movie is bad. For starters, most of the kids liked it,³ which was fun. And I enjoyed attempting to dad-splain Martin Scorsese. Those of us who didn’t enjoy the movie on the merits still enjoyed talking about how we didn’t like it.

Participating in common activities is kind of a floor raiser in terms of how bad your evening can possibly be.

It can be a ceiling raiser, too. Two movies that I saw this year alone in theaters were the good-but-not-great crime thrillers “Tuner” and “Crime 101.” I like watching movies alone, and I like well-crafted genre movies even if they’re a bit formulaic and predictable. But I would have liked them more if I’d grabbed drinks with friends afterward to talk about them with. “Tuner,” in particular, I’ve been dying to have conversations about because I wonder if it was transparent to the audience that the villains were Israeli. It’s not overtly stated anywhere, but if you have a “had a bar mitzvah 23 years ago” level of knowledge of Hebrew, you can clearly tell that’s the language they speak privately and also notice that they knew what to say when crashing a shiva. It seemed like a conscious decision to set up a contrast between the moral diaspora Jewish surrogate family and the villainous Israelis, but I also don’t know how clear the decision was to most viewers. But I think I only know one person who’s seen this movie. Maybe you all will discuss it with me?

Pseudo-friends and pseudo-solutions

These days, the only television show I really follow closely in the sense of watching every episode when it comes out is “House of the Dragon.”

I don’t even like “House of the Dragon” all that much, though I do love George R.R. Martin’s books. But I like it a bit. And I love the recap podcasts that Mallory Rubin and Joanna Robinson do — podcasts that are considerably longer than the episodes themselves. I watch “House of the Dragon” on Sunday night, then listen to the “fast” recap pod (usually only slightly longer than an episode) on Monday morning, and then stream the much longer “deep dive” recap pod on Wednesday and Thursday after it comes out on Tuesday night. It’s like in high school when I used to watch “Dawson’s Creek” primarily because other people were watching “Dawson’s Creek” and I enjoyed being in the loop. Except instead of being in the loop for conversations with my actual friends, I’m listening in on conversations between my parasocial friends.

As a podcaster myself, I also benefit from these kinds of relationships in the other direction. And to the extent that in life one needs something to do while driving, unloading the dishwasher, and so forth, I think it’s great that podcasts exist to fill that niche.

But I think it’s fair to say that these days, Americans are increasingly missing out on authentic human connection.

I’ve noticed a lot of political entrepreneurs observing lately that the fundamental building blocks of liberal politics and economic growth don’t provide all that is needed for human flourishing (this is a big theme of recent books from both JD Vance and Chris Murphy).

Their takeaway, though, seems to be that we should all turn our backs on liberal politics and economic growth, as if authentic connection and strong community will just spring up naturally as a result of tariffs or arbitrary regulatory burdens on private equity.

It seems to me that we are more than 10 years into this experiment of channeling people’s personal feelings of disappointment and isolation and sadness into extreme political causes, and it keeps not working.

What I think we ought to do instead is think about the specific issue that a post-monoculture world, though better in certain respects, is yet another headwind to spending time out of the house talking to people. We’re not going to put the toothpaste back in the tube, but we can probably do things to mitigate and compensate. Nobody in 1826 went to the gym to work out; people did hard labor. They didn’t diet; they avoided malnutrition.

Progress generated problems, and we came up with solutions to those problems. These days you can live a totally sedentary lifestyle and eat refined carbs and sugar for every meal of the day, but you shouldn’t do that, and we’ve had to build systems and habits and businesses around getting ourselves to not live that way. And the easiest step on that journey is to celebrate and participate in the big mass events we’ve got.

1. I know Europeans think this is because Americans are all short-attention-span adrenaline junkies, but there’s a genuine problem in my opinion with the fact that a team can often play a game to a draw despite playing markedly worse over the course of the game.

2. Ask your parents.

3. My son also liked “The Rise of Skywalker,” which goes to show we may be in trouble as a society in the future.