>>222558 (OP)As I'm older I have a harder time mustering the effort to consume.
I switched from anime to manga/manhua because scrolling images and reading blurbs is much less friction than watching anime.
With anime you have an intro, and then content equal to 15-20 pages of manga stretch to 20 minutes.
By the time some dude finishes a monologue I could already have scrolled a whole chapter and the plot, characters etc. don't meaningfully improve by voice acting or animation, quite the opposite.
They stretch still images for 10 seconds at a time. It feels tedious. Also too much going on to process if I get distracted.
Same for video games. You need to spend about 4 hours on average just to learn the nonsense frivolous systems they "have to have". There is no booting up the game and just playing anymore.
It takes actual effort to get to a state of mindless enjoyment where you no longer have to actively think about the BS that stands between you and the gameplay. This is why I stick to games I already know for longer than they deserve, familiarity gives comfort.
Books I don't like for the most part. They are high effort consumables so if they disappoint they hurt a lot more than "fast food".
All of the above results in basically one thing. Juice not worth the squeeze.
>To be clear here, it's not that I'm unable to feel any kind of pleasure. I do but it never "feels good" afterwards.This is my issue with creative/IRL hobbies as well. The results don't satisfy, the journey is too long as an adult to enjoy.
Even if I carve some wooden figure, build a gunpla, or build a deck of cards for my childhood TCG it just feels empty after the momentary joy.
The worst part isn't even that the joy fades, but it turns into pain later on.
Looking at old gunpla that gave me joy X days ago, today I'm filled with disgust for some reason. This happens with most things that were fun once.
Dread and disgust. Not sure why, maybe a sense of loss? I don't know. Wish I had the answers.