Why read something you don’t care for?

A minor matter of a subscription raises a point of vital importance.

Our writer has, occasionally, aspirations.  Not ambitions–he is an honorable man, at least as far as we know–but now and then he writes poems.  Some are amusing; some are written only to try out an improbable meter.  But a couple have been praised by serious poets.  So he sent them in to a poetry magazine that was running a contest on the theme of his “best” work.

He didn’t get printed, but did take out a subscription to the magazine.  (It was, he admits, backwards: he should have studied the market beforehand, then chosen where to submit his writings; but the contest was closing soon, and there wasn’t time.)  It provides a look into a curious world and its inhabitants, people who are very different from scientists.  Poetry is a very subjective and personal genre, he finds, subdivided into many sub-cultures.  The one represented by this magazine, well, he simply doesn’t understand a good portion of it.  Much of the rest is uninteresting.  All in all, he concluded that continuing the subscription wasn’t useful and he should end it, possibly looking for another one closer to his own ideas.

But he didn’t, for a very important reason.

It’s now possible for each one of us to associate only with people who are very much like ourselves.  Our Facebook and Twitter and Instagram friends are chosen deliberately; we listen to a particular news channel, one of many choices, and watch particular TV shows on-demand.  It’s possible to go for long periods without any disagreement surfacing, and even then it takes the form of a ridiculing post on social media.  This is not a good thing.  The resulting social fragmentation and polarization have been commented on many times; but still most people hear only what they already believe.

So our writer continues his subscription to the magazine because it doesn’t suit him.  He will continue to read the output of English adjunct professors and the fruits of poetry workshops, talking about subjects in which he has little interest in ways that are difficult to fathom.  It’s his own way of fighting the fragmentation of society.  And–who knows?–he just might learn something.