YouTube might have millions of videos.

I might be spending two hours there.

But I do not believe I am exposed to more than one hundred unique videos per day.

Same for Spotify, that number might just be twenty songs.

Reels is the true novelty.

Ten seconds average per reel.

Six reels per minute.

Three hundred sixty per hour.

Fifteen hundred to two thousand in a day.

I think it went like this.

We had one reality.

Then art came and simulated another reality and created novelty.

Each form of media which was most popular in its era just increased the number of novel experiences in a time period.

First there was a single storyteller.

Then multiple storytellers.

Then books.

Books brought novelty but required effort and time to experience.

You had to sit and read to access the novelty.

Then libraries.

Libraries increased the quantity of available novelty.

But the time and effort needed to extract each unit of novelty stayed high.

Then came records.

Then theatres.

Then FM.

Then CDs with music and movies.

Then internet.

Then YouTube.

YouTube increased availability but the novelty speed stayed medium.

Each video still required minutes of attention.

Spotify personalized delivery but still had low novelty count per session.

Reels changed everything.

Reels compressed novelty into ten-second clips.

Each swipe delivered a completely new unit of content.

Reels required no effort and almost no time to get novelty.

Reels let you experience over a thousand different moments in one day.

This was the format where both time and effort were near zero per unit of novelty.

Every new reel gave a new sound, face, setting, or mood.

Each unit was fast, light, and standalone.

Maybe in the future it will be something even more short and more novel.

Maybe novelty will become richer, faster, and frictionless in ways we can’t yet describe.

The direction is clear.

Novelty keeps increasing.

Time and effort keep going down.

But is our brain capable of not melting in face of it.

Are we not jeopardizing the process of creating our own life’s novelties by indulging in these synthetic realities and therir novelties?