Back when TV was free, it was better. Sitcoms ruled network television through the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, and the world was better for it. Most sitcom actors weren’t celebrities, they were working theater actors, character actors, and unknown comedians who served the script instead of themselves.
By the mid-‘80s and throughout the ‘90s, stand-up comedians started dominating sitcoms. Most weren’t famous beforehand, and that was fine, but once celebrity culture wanted in, the decline began. It stopped being about sharp writing, great timing, and memorable characters. It became about personality worship.
The attitude shifted from “Here’s a funny story” to “Look at me, I’m funny.”
Now we have streaming, twenty minutes of scrolling just to find something you won’t shut off after the first ten minutes. Endless options, endless content, yet somehow nothing memorable. Back then, networks had to earn your attention with strong writing, solid characters, and timing. Now it feels like quantity replaced quality, and algorithms replaced creativity.
And what do most people end up watching on these streaming services? Repeats of old sitcoms like Seinfeld, The Office, and Cheers.
When we had less, we actually had more. Now that we have more, we somehow ended up with less. And with the less comes regular price increases, where once it was just the price of electricity.
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Which is better for the mind when celebrated with weed.
Music or screen time. History’s timeline.
Weed + friends + rock records is clearly superior.
The classic era you’re remembering, weed + rock ‘n’ roll records with friends, peaked in the 1960s–1970s (hippie counterculture, vinyl listening parties, festivals) and lingered through the ‘80s and early ‘90s with cassettes, CDs, and dorm-room stereos. That was communal by nature: passing the joint, flipping the album side, arguing over lyrics, eyes meeting. Cannabis was the enhancer of shared sound and soul.
Cannabis is a proven psycho-acoustic enhancer for music. It deepens absorption, heightens emotional resonance, slows time perception so every note lands harder, and boosts sensory pleasure and “wanting to listen.” Multiple studies (including recent Canadian research) show users report significantly higher music absorption and enjoyment when high, lyrics hit deeper, bass feels physical, the whole experience becomes meditative and connective.
Done with friends in person: it builds real social bonds, empathy, conversation, and emotional processing. Music already reduces anxiety and loneliness; add shared cannabis and you get vulnerability without the screen buffer. This is the mind-expanding ritual that fosters wholeness, the very integrity we’ve been circling in our conversation. It keeps the ledger clean because it demands presence.
Weed + video games/screen time offers sharper cognitive edges but heavier long-term costs.
In today’s weed crop, certain strains can heighten immersion, make visuals pop, and amplify flow-state dopamine hits during wins or puzzles. Some gamers report better focus or reaction in moderated use.
Downsides stack fast. Scoping reviews show a consistent positive link between cannabis use and gaming, often intertwined in problematic patterns. Both activities light up the same reward circuits, creating stronger addiction loops than either alone. Heavy combos correlate with higher risks of isolation, sleep disruption, working-memory impairment (cannabis hits the prefrontal cortex hard), and in vulnerable people, even psychotic symptoms. The activity is mostly sedentary and solitary/virtual, trading real human friction for escapism.
Tech made it inevitable: analog rituals take effort; digital ones are frictionless, always available, infinitely replayable, and massively profitable. The joint stayed the same. The setting changed from flesh-and-blood friends to avatars and headsets.
However, the old ritual nourishes the whole mind, emotional, social, creative. The new one trains specific skills (strategy, reflexes) at the expense of presence and connection. In an age where commitments already shatter and lies dominate deals, the vinyl circle kept people accountable to each other’s faces. The gaming session lets you log off and ghost. One builds the unbreakable word inside you. The other can quietly erode it.
The mind that still chooses the turntable and the circle is the one that stays whole.
The ritual doesn’t matter.
The presence does.
Anything that brings you back to yourself sharpens the mind.
You don’t walk into another man’s house and start rearranging the furniture.
You don’t kick holes in the walls because you prefer a different design.
And you certainly don’t insult the roof that is sheltering you.
Yet that is what I see happening more and more.
People arriving in a place they did not build, protected by freedoms they did not fight for, standing under a flag they did not carry, and then demanding the whole structure change to match the world they left behind.
If the system you came from was so superior, why leave it?
Why abandon it for the very country you now claim is broken?
Freedom is a remarkable thing.
But freedom is not the same as entitlement.
A nation cannot survive if everyone who enters the house tries to tear out the foundation.
There is a reason a builder pours concrete first before the walls ever go up.
In this country, that foundation is shared values, responsibility, and respect for the structure that already exists.
I don’t know who’s writing the scripts for a lot of these shows on Amazon, Netflix, and the other streaming platforms. Sometimes it honestly feels like AI wrote them. The dialogue is so bad it doesn’t even sound like real people talking. It’s like they’re trying to be clever, but it never lands.
The characters all feel the same, flat, overly “cool,” and completely unbelievable. Nobody seems to know how to write actual human beings anymore.
And can we stop with the constant tattoos on every character? Finger snakes, letters across the knuckles, sleeves everywhere. I’m basically talking about the women in particular here. It feels like every character is built from the same template with deep seated emotional dissonance, but reel cool.
How about some characters that actually resemble common people? People you might meet in real life.
Until then, I’ll keep going back to Seinfeld, The Office, The Sopranos, and films I’ve watched countless times, stories where the characters actually felt real and the bad dialogue didn’t yank you out of the moment.
Chu The Cud 