1-23-2026

The Backlog and Existence

There is something very human about accumulating more books/games/music than one could consume over our remaining lifetime. Every hour, new media pops up and our schedule forces us into a pact with our own happiness: I will make time for this later. We believe that the backlog is formed to give us a fighting chance against our finitude. We want to experience everyting that we might find meaningful, but we can't, and then we realize the backlog is simple a monument to the imposible.

I called the backlog a "monument to impossibility" because monuments commemorate something that's already happened or lost. Our Steam libraries with 300 unplayed games, our Goodreads "to-read" shelves with 500 books are monuments to:

• The person we imagine ourselves to be (cultured, well-read, intellectually curious)
• The life we imagine we'll have (one with infinite free time and energy)
• All the possible selves we'll never become (the person who read every Dune book, who played every Final Fantasy, who watched Criterion's entire collection)

This post comes from a influx of people sharing their backlogs over the internet. Technology has open the doors of abudance by removing the limitations of space. Book purchases were limited by the room available in our living space. Now, we can carry continuously purchase more and store them all in the same ebook reader. Digital games used to be stacked on livingroom floors. Now, we have multiple unplayed games living in digital storage for years and many more waiting to be purchased for incredibly accessible prices. Sales pulls consumers into buying in case we are able to free ourselves from the present. Social media made our awareness super-sensitive by adding notifications to what others are doing, people who we know and we relate to, steering us into falsely believing that their experiences might need to be ours as well.

Seneca wrote "it is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it". The backlog is the waste Seneca warns us about - a list of prospective experiences shows us what we would like to do but haven't. By creating a backlog we set possibilities front and center, all of those future experiences that we might miss out on become palpable. By relinquishing the time used to plan the future, your present becomes your focus. The act of adding to your backlog feels like engagement with culture, but it's actually the opposite. It's administrative work masquerading as cultural participation. You spend 30 minutes organizing your Steam library by genre instead of actually playing a game. You spend an hour curating a Letterboxd watchlist instead of watching a film. The backlog becomes a shield against actually confronting the art itself. The fear comes from what might challenge us, bore us, or force us to admit we don't actually care about something we think we should care about.

Change of Hearts

Do you only eat for substinance? I couldn't

In my mind, looking forward "to eat" changes importance with the subject. I feel more excited for cake than broccoli, but I know broccoli is better for me. Similarly, "looking forward to a tv show" and "having to watch a tv show" do not feel the same. We might love show either way but the period of time we use on our way to that enjoyment can feel heavy or light. The knowledge that you have good books unread or films unwatched creates a form of abundance. Just like that we are "rich" in potential experiences and that elevates us.The backlog represents preserved choice. You've curated options for your future self without committing to consume them immediately. This honors both present and future agency. Your current self expresses values by selecting what goes in the backlog, while your future self retains freedom about when and whether to engage.

The act of building a backlog can be seen as a form of self-cultivation. You're not just passively consuming whatever's most readily available, but actively shaping your cultural diet. In Aristotelian virtue ethics, the character (ethos) is formed habit. You become virtuous not through abstract knowledge but through doing virtuous things. Building and maintaining a media backlog can be understood as a practice that cultivates specific intellectual and aesthetic virtues:

• Temperance/Self-discipline: Resisting the impulse to immediately consume everything creates a gap between desire and action
• Discernment: Choosing what goes in your backlog requires judgment about quality, relevance, and value
• Practical wisdom (phronesis): develops judgment about your own needs and capacities

Self-Governance

The Stoic claim is still pretty radical: You're only enslaved by what you give power over you through your judgments. Even physical coercion can't touch your inner freedom if you maintain sovereignty over your assent. I want a backlog so I can cultivate my own wisdom, through my decisions, and understand myself better through the comparison of my choices and opinions. I want to know if what sounds good, in theory, is actually good, to me.

I decided to make a media backlog and share some of it with everyone who is curious. Please do yourself a favor, and avoid using my backlog as your own. Don't lose the growth that comes with it and avoid the FOMO that only you can control.

Some of my backlog

• Crime and Punishment (book) By Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Sapies by Yuval Noah (book) Harari
• Neuromancer (book) by William Gibson
• Metroid Fusion (game)
• Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (game)
• Pokemon Seaglass (game)
• Citizen Kane (movie) by Orson Welles
• Metropolis (movie) by Rintaro
• Fight club (movie) by David Fincher
• Are you experienced? by The Jimmy Hendrix Experience
• ¡Demolicion! by Los Saicos
• Fighting Demons by Juice World

There is a lot more on the list but a lot less time to complete it but that's ok, I am excited to have started it. I will count it as a positive.