Must we consume everything?

Over the past year, I’ve found myself deep in an idol fandom thanks to the Philippine pop girl group BINI. I’m not completely unaware of how idol or music fandoms work, because I was a casual fan of BTS and I have had friends in different KPop fandoms. I had some idea of how organized, how diverse these fandoms could be. I’ve also been a casual Swiftie, and I understand the fervor that comes with supporting an artist you feel understands you, someone who makes you feel seen.

But there is a difference between seeing a picture of a whale and grasping the walls of its belly.

I am in the belly.

And while I’ve been in fandoms (mostly for TV shows and movies) for over two decades, I don’t think anyone prepared me for the amount of consumption I’d come face to face with.

In less than a year, I’ve gone from casual listener of music to hardcore fan, with more content than I know what to do with.

There’s official content from the talent and the management, there’s edits from fans, articles and videos from media outlets, influencers, and creators, and even content about their private time. Including content from friends and family who may or may not have public social media accounts. And then there’s the analysis and meta discourse about everything going on.

This week, I found myself overstimulated because of all of the content and I just went on a break. How do celebrities—especially female celebrities—withstand the firehose of attention?

I don’t think we should know this much about a person.

I don’t think being a fan means I should have some knowledge about who they had dinner with or what they had for dinner.

I don’t think I should know what their family or friends do for a living, unless they’re also public figures.

And I don’t think that getting random 144p photos of famous people out and about somewhere should ever be something we see as normal.

Navigating all of this has led me to ask myself: Where’s the line? How far back am I willing to push the line? And am I still appreciating and mindfully taking in the art or am I just mindlessly consuming everything that comes my way?

I decided to take a bit of a break to try and refocus and to figure out what level of engagement within fandom would be healthy for me (a tall order when fandom is also part of my work and the research I want to do for school). But what is healthy fandom? Does that even exist? 

A study on fans of violently themed music (as in music with graphic violence in its lyrics) showed that even with the content focusing on things like assault or torture, harmonious passion (defined as a person engaging in what they like while balancing this with other life activities) was more likely to lead to positive experiences with the music and with key wellbeing measures such as thriving and meaning in life. 

Meanwhile, the same study found that fans who exhibit obsessive passion (defined as “uncontrollable passionate engagement with an activity”, continuing to engage even when people experience negative effects and feel negative emotions if they can’t take part in it) were more likely to have negative experiences with the music and predicted ill-being in a person, potentially even contributing to symptoms of anxiety and depression. 

What could harmonious passion look like? One of my favorite examples is from two different football clubs. Glasgow Rangers FC supporters used a mobile health app, which not only enabled them to track health metrics for themselves but also helped them look out for other members of the fan community, checking in on people who might have been falling off the table, allowing fans to connect with the club and with their fellow fans even beyond Scotland, or inviting other fellow fans to run or walk together. There’s another famous example, this time from Sport Club Recife fans, who supported an initiative that helped drive sign-ups for Brazil’s organ donor program, helping reduce wait lists and enable life-saving transplants.

A different study notes that social interactions with other fans made it possible for fandom (in this study defined not just as identifying as a fan, but also as a fan belonging to a community and being glad to be part of said community) to facilitate wellbeing. 

In my own life, I’ve decided to set up blocks in my day for fangirling, instead of passively checking social media every couple of minutes. 

So far, what’s been working with me is checking and hanging out with people on social media during my lunch break and after dinner or work hours. I’m also evaluating how many group chats I really need to be on, and whenever something pops up on my feed or in my group chats, I’ve started asking myself, “Do I need to react to this? Do I need to contribute to this?” It has been a few days, so I don’t think my experience is anything but anecdotal, but I’ve found that I’m able to stay mindful and stress less about what’s happening in my community, and I feel I have more agency when it comes to what to respond to and even how to respond. 

Now, at this point, you might ask: Aren’t you overthinking this? 

And to that I say, maybe. But as I grow older as a fan, I’ve come to realize that I can no longer engage in the way that my twenty-something self once did. I know better that fanwars don’t mean anything in the long run, statistics don’t tell the story of what makes a track, a movie, a TV show, or a sports team compelling, and that our engagement with the things we love changes as we grow older. 

What I can contribute now, as an older fan, is the perspective of someone who appreciates the lulls and the silence, someone who has seen celebrities get ground up by paparazzi and fan attention, someone who has watched technology evolve to this point where there are deepfakes and someone’s voice can be used for something else, in a snap—someone who can say, “Hey, maybe think about why we’re here for a second.” 

People love to bring up the fact that fan comes from fanatic, as if that should excuse its more consumerist and toxic tendencies. I’d argue that most definitions of fan highlight the words ardent and enthusiastic, and neither of those things are inherently toxic. 

To love, to devote one’s self to a pursuit does not mean to treat people, their lives, and their work as things to consume and discard. In an age where technology is attempting to take apart the human piece by piece, trying to see what of our image, our voices, our ideas it can productize and replicate at scale—maybe it’s time to say no. We’re not going to let that happen.