The era of no endings

I've been thinking a lot lately, about a concept... or a feeling, maybe? For sure a thought.

About how there are no endings anymore.

I think it must have started with infinite scroll, but honestly, it was a thing way before that. You know where cliffhangers came from, right? Dickens and Hardy pioneered it from what I understand, with Hardy literally ending a story with a character hanging from the edge of a cliff.

The more modern TV cliffhanger loses some of its suspense, it was probably leaked somewhere anyway, so they go ahead and show clips from the next episode.

None of these concepts are new, is what I'm getting at here.

A list

What's got my goat right now is the way the philosphy is applied to so much more now. It was innocent enough when it was just TV shows, but the idea is being milked to oblivion. I'm just gonna list a stream of consciousness:

Your social media feed? Endless scroll.

The content posted there? Memes: regurgitated.

Television news? Well, there's another place the art of the tease has been perfected.

Netflix recommendations? An endless barrage.

While we're in media: Marvel movies. Iron man died.

Politics, I wont' dwell here, because I'm thinking about it for another post: but American politics is epitomizing this right now. Oh, there I go!

The first one in my list there is the one that got me thinking. Well, maybe the first two. I was scrolling one day, as you do, and stumbled across a funny video.