Curation inflation

Telluride Daily Planet, Friday, May 23, 2025

“We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think.” — Buddha

In 1974, the book most often seen in the halls of my Catholic girls’ high school — invariably wrapped in brown paper — was The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty. Reading as we walked from class to class, it’s no exaggeration to say we were obsessed with the sinister Catholic vibe and with scaring the hair right off our arms.

Yes, in a story about a girl whose demonic behaviors eventually require a priest’s exorcism, we bonded. In the fear and pheromones we generated and bounced off each other, we could savor the terror, the rebellious spiritual dare of a chillingly profane read. Does this have to do with health? Read on.

Some of us went on to gravitate to horror stories, or psychological thrillers — evil vs. good, the dark side, the underbellies, the twisted ways of humanity — finding that we could shake all the dark dust off and resume our lives, happier than ever to be in our own skin. And some of us went another way.

Being a person who has watched pretty much any horror movie through cupped hands and gone to bed one too many times with filaments of disturbing TV shows threaded into my sleep, I am one of the latter. I eventually curated my book and movie selections to exclude Blatty and Stephen King and all the others.

Curation: In the 20th century, this word was generally used to reference museum or gallery shows. An expert’s education and/or aesthetic sensibilities informed their selections in creating collections that might represent a theme well. Some, in fact, felt like pure genius! The root of the word is in the Latin curare, to take care of, and to the degree that a subject was brilliantly taken care of, it fit perfectly.

With the coming of extreme quantities of digital content and marketing, however, “curate” has come to be used in pretty much every conceivable way. We’ve all seen curated clothing advertised in a boutique; curated bento boxes; curated newsletters, playlists and feeds; curated vacations. Virtually any kind of visual or experiential collection has had the word “curated” tacked onto it: how will we curate a charcuterie board, a nightstand, or our dog’s dinner?

Meanwhile, we must not ignore the more profound and insidious worm of content curation burrowing in the ground of our lives by algorithms that follow us, suggesting more for us of what we already have, more of whatever direction we may have suggested we’re going. Netflix tells us what we want to watch next; Facebook reaffirms and potentially radicalizes (narrows) what we think; and retailers relentlessly tell us what we’ll need next. We can easily find ourselves reading and buying what is put in front of us, without use of thought or free will, at all.

You can almost feel yourself walking the “creepy line” as Google CEO Eric Schmidt called it in 2010 when describing the boundary where data collection and surveillance meet user comfort — hovering just at the edge of what people will tolerate without pushing back.

None of this is new. But in terms of our mental health, it is never too late to start re-curating our brains, especially with the advent and supercharged growth of AI, which is delivering hyper-personalized content curation across the board. Of the various downsides — like echo chambers (you reflect yourself and people like you) and manipulation — my least favorite and the one that feels like the biggest transgression is decreased serendipity and diversity in our lives. What is a world without regular experience of these things and the ability to recognize them as such?

Even before the advent of algorithms, I’ll admit the curation of my own brain has left much to be desired. What have I lazily posted and reposted in my own mind for better or worse? If it is true that 90-95% of my thoughts today are the same as yesterday’s, and that I have now been manipulated in great part by content fed me, what do I do to diversify the mindscape and encourage serendipity — to refresh the rutted terrain?

A huge topic. Rather than getting bogged down, let’s just say this: Memorize a poem; hug a tree; think a new thought;consider an opposing view; stare out the window; leave space for inspiration. Oh, and unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe.