This isn’t what you think.

Once again I’m rewatching the office. At this point it’s a background playlist in my life, something to put on across those nebulous holiday periods, or the second half of a long haul flight. It has cropped up with varied frequency across the last decade since I first saw it.

This is not unique, to me or this show.

Yet after all this time there are still jokes I missed, even on the third, fifth, or fifteenth rewatch. There are quotes I’ve misremembered, misattributed, and apparently even made up out of whole cloth.

But this thread isn’t about the office, or nostalgia, I’m not about to lambast our pursuit of small background comforts in a world where the foreground is full of fire, fear, and frenzy.

What it is about is how truly fallible our memory is, even with content it is intimately familiar with. How we can see something a hundred times, yet still miss things about it. How a wrong assumption can carry forward and redefine the truth as we bring it to others.

A hundred hours isn’t enough to fully take in a light hearted comedy.

So why on earth would you think the 1.5 - 3 seconds you look at something as you scroll is enough to truly take anything in. To form a complete memory or opinion based on it. Why are you, in a world full of so much depth, barely skimming the surface?

And then we have the absolute audacity to decry this media we have given barely a passing glance to, to lament the lack of x or y, to be angered over something that was merely a facet of our own media illiteracy or misrepresented wilfully for outraged clicks.

This isn’t what you think, because you’ve not spent enough time with it to fully form a thought.