Curation

by Dan Masterton

My brothers and I often poke fun at my dad, who is nearing 70.

One of our favorite foibles of his? His penchant for syndicated shows, for flipping channels, and for watching movies on TV when cable TV just happens to play them. No matter what we do or say – including personally logging into my Disney+ on his smartTV and setting him up with a personal account and a preexisting favorites list – he just prefers to sit down and see what’s on.

Remember when remotes looked like this?

We three millennial sons just cannot fathom this anymore. Sure, we remember a time when we would put on the TV Guide channel and watch the program guide scroll slowly up the screen. But this is 2022, and we use our streaming services to watch what we want, when we want, how we want. And our dear old dad just doesn’t work this way.

On one hand, it’s frustrating, because we know there’s a lot he’d enjoy watching, whether reclaimed old stuff or new things that are right up his alley. But on the other hand, we kind of get it. It can certainly be overwhelming to pick through the myriad choices available, especially with six millennial sons/daughters-in-law worth of accounts hurling ideas at him. And for him, when he sits down, he just wants what he knows. And “missing out” on stuff doesn’t bother him, a virtually FOMO-less boomer, in the slightest.

A more frustrating version of this manifests in my dear four-year-old daughter, Lucy. She is a picky eater. However, I don’t mean that there’s a set of foods she won’t eat and a set of foods she insists upon – though that’s sometimes true. I mean that she has no consistency in what she wants and doesn’t want. And when we bring up a new food, especially one that we think is nicely adjacent to foods she already likes, she usually won’t even try a bite (our policy is “two no-thank-you bites” before we make her a different food).

In the self-incriminating way that only little kids can nail, Lucy often looks at me or my wife, Katherine, as we eat a certain food, and authentically asks, “Why do you like that?” And you know what… how can you even answer? It tastes good… but that’s largely subjective. I like the texture or spice or juiciness… subjective again. Food is so largely about one’s willingness to try different foods in different preparations or different combinations that it’s difficult to answer the question plainly.

Sometimes, I try to be grown up and hand-bread
chicken strips like this. Other times, I am just weak
and order the same food as my kids.

Often, I just turn it around on her. “Lucy, why do you like McDonald’s chicken nuggets or peanut butter toast?” She usually doesn’t have more of a reply than “I just like it,” and I sort of hope the futility of the discussion illustrates the point for her. You have to do some trial and error, receive suggestions, and offer feedback. It’s a lesson we’ll have to reteach and relearn perennially, both for our kids and ourselves, really.

When I was in middle school, the Harry Potter book series had just started. In my ignorance, I followed the early trend and made a brief attempt at reading the first book. My interest fizzled, and I let it go until the movies came out. After seeing the first movie, I resolved to just wait for each movie to come out rather than try to read the books. They were getting increasingly long. The book nerds were chastising the rest of us for not reading and settling for abridged versions of the stories in the movies. And I was thinking there was no way to dig out of that hole and catch up to the movies and nerdom anyway.

Then in college, I met Katherine – someone who, with her brother, obtained new installments of Harry Potter at midnight at the bookstore and read them in a day or less. Since all the movies had come out by then, I knew the whole story (at least as the movies told them) already. So, in a way, I was free to read the books on their own merits. She badly wanted me to read them – both because she thought I’d enjoy them and also because she wanted to watch me read them and discuss them with me in depth.

So I read them. And you know what? They were great! I really enjoyed them. I really enjoyed discussing the characters and plot and themes with others. And I was able to admit that the movies were solid in their own right but certainly (if necessarily) a reduction of the books. I look forward to helping my kids read them and enjoying them yet another time as a family. These are joys I wouldn’t have known if I had stubbornly clung to past choices over her curation.

This is all to say that curation is a fascinating phenomenon. And in modern life, there is a tremendously easy path toward complete self-curation, or at least the facade of it when one is steered almost entirely by the invisible hand of algorithms that fuel social media, phone apps, and streaming platforms.

I think the lesson for me is to remain open to others’ suggestions. Sure, there are times when the note I keep in my phone of shows and movies to watch grows impossibly long, and it doesn’t even feel like it will be fun to catch up to it. But, when I have time for a show or movie, can I find the curiosity to branch out beyond my own reliable favorites to honor another person’s idea? Certainly, there’s time where the old nightstand book stack has piled mighty high, and it feels daunting to crack open a new book. But, when I go to read, can I give that book rec from a friend a fresh chance? When I’m able to, I realize my close friends and family are often amazingly insightful curators for me.

I think the same things can be said for music, food, social outings – and even for spirituality.

How receptive are you to
others' suggestions?
Foods, movies, shows,
outings, music?

Allow wider curation to bolster your prayer, your piety, your spiritual reading. If I had been too stubborn, I never would have found the joys of Taize Prayer. I also might not have found with greater certainty, after fresh tries every few years, that the Liturgy of the Hours really isn’t my favorite. I’ve learned that sitting in the front of church (suggested by parent-friends to us) isn’t best for my kids, who do better near the back. By writing for an editor, I’ve learned how to write to catechize or offer faith-forward reflections to a more churched audience as well as identify different approaches and vocabulary to reach those starting from a more distant point.

And you know what may be even more satisfying than enjoying that other person’s suggestion? Telling them you enjoyed it, and sharing that mutual enjoyment. If all else fails as you audit your curation tendencies, ask yourself the empathetic question that keeps me trying to stay continuously open to others: how would you feel if someone ignored your suggestion?