We got everything we ever wanted, and it ruined everything we ever loved.

That’s the curse of living in the age of On Demand, where every song ever recorded is available at the touch of a screen, where entire seasons of television shows can be consumed in a single weekend, where the latest movies appear in your living room before the theater seats have cooled off. We have access to more entertainment than any generation in human history, and somehow we’ve never been more bored.

The problem isn’t the abundance—it’s what the abundance destroyed. We gained infinite choice and lost something that might have been more valuable: the exquisite torture of having to wait for what we wanted.

Saturday Morning Kingdom

There was a time when Saturday morning belonged to children. Not just technically—because parents were sleeping in and nobody had to get dressed for school—but spiritually, completely, unapologetically. From six in the morning until noon, the airwaves were ours, and we knew it.

You didn’t need an alarm clock. The anticipation was alarm enough. Somewhere around dawn, your internal kid-clock would go off and you’d be wide awake, practically vibrating with excitement. The house was quiet, the world was still, and for the next six hours, television would be programmed entirely for you.

The commercials were proof of our sovereignty. Kids on bikes racing through suburban neighborhoods, friends building treehouses and having backyard adventures, everyone hopped up on sugar and possibility. McDonald’s Happy Meals, Hawaiian Punch that turned your tongue red, cereals so loaded with sugar they should have come with a health warning—and did, eventually, but that came later, after the lawyers got involved.

Saturday morning felt like a great big world full of kids living the kind of lives that kids were supposed to live. The commercials weren’t selling products so much as they were selling a vision of childhood itself: boundless energy, endless summer, and enough sugar to fuel whatever adventure came next.

But you had to be there. You had to get up early, claim your spot on the living room floor, and ride the entire wave from the first cartoon to the last. Miss it and it was gone until next week. There was no pause button, no rewind, no “watch it later.” Saturday morning cartoons were a live event, a shared experience that connected every kid in America to the same sugar-fueled broadcast frequency.

The Hunt for Music

Kids today discovering music for the first time have no idea what they’re missing. They type a band name into Spotify and instantly have access to every song the group ever recorded, plus suggestions for twenty similar artists, plus playlists curated by algorithms that know their listening habits better than they do.

But they’ll never know the thrill of the hunt. The genuine excitement of walking into a record store and finding something you’d been looking for for months. The way older kids—cooler kids, kids who seemed to have access to some secret knowledge—would tell you about bands you’d never heard of, dropping names like they were sharing classified information.

You’d read about a group in Rolling Stone or Creem magazine, some brief mention in an article about something else entirely, and that name would stick in your head for weeks until you finally heard them on the radio. And when that moment came—when the DJ said the name you’d been waiting for—it felt like the universe had finally lined up in your favor.

Recording songs off the radio became an art form. You’d sit there with your finger hovering over the record button, waiting for your song to come on, praying the DJ wouldn’t talk over the beginning or cut it off for a commercial. When you got a clean recording, it felt like capturing lightning in a bottle.

Finding a bootleg or an import that nobody else had was like discovering buried treasure. You’d guard that knowledge like a secret, playing it for friends like you were initiating them into some exclusive club. The rarity made it precious. The difficulty of obtaining it made it sacred.

And then there was the ritual of coming home with a new album—actually new to you, even if it was used—and listening to it for the first time while studying every detail of the album cover, reading the liner notes like they were ancient texts that might reveal the meaning of life.

The Economics of Scarcity

Sure, it’s great to be able to find anything at all on YouTube. Any song, any album, any obscure B-side that was only released in Japan in 1974—it’s all there, waiting for you. But the fundamental rules of supply and demand still apply, even to art, even to music, even to the things we love.

When something is easy to get, when it costs nothing and requires no effort, how much can it really be worth? When every song ever recorded is equally available, how do you decide what’s worth your attention? When there’s no hunt, no search, no difficulty in acquisition, what’s left to make discovery feel special?

The streaming services try to recreate the experience of discovery with their recommendation algorithms, but there’s something fundamentally different about being told what you might like versus stumbling across it yourself. The algorithm knows your patterns, but it can’t replicate the random magic of hearing something completely unexpected on late-night radio or finding it buried in a used record bin.

The Death of Shared Experience

But maybe the biggest loss isn’t individual—it’s collective. We used to have shared cultural moments that brought entire generations together. Who shot J.R.? Everyone in America was asking that question at the same time, waiting for the same answer, experiencing the same collective suspense.

When there were only three networks, when everyone was watching the same shows at the same time, television had a kind of cultural power that’s impossible to replicate in the streaming age. Water cooler conversations actually meant something because everyone had watched the same thing the night before.

Now we’re all consuming content on our own schedules, in our own bubbles, having our own individual experiences with entertainment that used to be communal. We can binge entire series in a weekend, but we can’t recreate the anticipation of waiting a week between episodes, the shared speculation about what would happen next, the collective gasp when something unexpected occurred.

The Paradox of Choice

Having everything available instantly should make us happier, more satisfied, more entertained. Instead, we spend more time scrolling through options than we do actually consuming content. The tyranny of choice has replaced the tyranny of scarcity, and it turns out that having too many options can be just as frustrating as having too few.

When you had to wait for Saturday morning to watch cartoons, you appreciated every minute of those six hours. When you finally found that album you’d been searching for, you listened to it obsessively because you’d invested so much effort in obtaining it. When your favorite show came on once a week, you made sure you were there to watch it.

Now we have infinite content and finite attention spans, unlimited options and no patience for any of them. We’ve gained convenience and lost investment. We’ve won the war against scarcity and discovered that scarcity was what made things precious in the first place.

The Ghost of Anticipation

The on-demand world has given us exactly what we asked for: everything we want, exactly when we want it, without effort or delay or the possibility of disappointment. And in getting everything we wanted, we lost something we didn’t know we needed: the sweet torture of anticipation, the joy of the hunt, the satisfaction that only comes from working for something.

Saturday morning cartoons aren’t coming back. Record stores are mostly gone. The shared cultural experience of everyone watching the same thing at the same time has been fractured into a million individual streaming experiences. These changes have brought real benefits—more choice, more convenience, more control over our entertainment.

But sometimes, late at night when I’m scrolling through endless options and finding nothing that captures my attention, I remember what it felt like to get up at dawn on Saturday morning, knowing that the next six hours belonged entirely to me and every other kid in America. And I wonder if we traded something irreplaceable for the convenience of getting everything we wanted, exactly when we wanted it.

The magic wasn’t in the cartoons themselves. It was in having to wait for them, in knowing they were special because they were rare, in sharing that experience with millions of other kids who had also set their internal alarm clocks for dawn.

We got everything we asked for. We just didn’t know that getting everything would make everything worth a little less.