I saw someone in an Instagram Reel say that he missed Blockbuster because it made him finish bad movies.
Once you had chosen a film, paid for it and taken it home, you usually watched it to the end. If you didn’t like it, you had to sit with that feeling. You began to notice where the story lost you, which scenes dragged and why the ending didn’t work.
That kind of attention is how you refine your judgment: you learn to recognise what works, understand why it works, and decide what you would do differently.
Taste doesn’t just develop by consuming only things you already like. You also need work that bores, confuses or challenges you. A bad film can teach you about pacing. An awkward interface can reveal the cost of making people think too much. A weak argument can show you where logic gives way to persuasion.
What matters is understanding your reaction instead of escaping it. Why didn’t this work? Where did I lose interest? What would I have done differently?
Today, escaping is easy. Recommendation systems learn what holds our attention and give us more of it. Yet research on algorithmic curation suggests that a system can accurately predict what we’ll choose next while narrowing what we might learn to enjoy later.
AI takes this further. It can answer a question immediately, solve a problem on demand, or generate an interface around a specific need. This is often useful, but it also means we spend less time struggling with questions, adapting to constraints, and forming judgments of our own.
If you want to make good work, you have to remain open to things that don’t immediately satisfy you. You have to handle the friction long enough to learn from it.
Blockbuster made that friction unavoidable. Now we have to choose it for ourselves.