I used to love spoilers. I would skip to the end of a book first and make decisions to watch movies based on critical reception and how much I enjoyed the synopsis. I once saw Avengers: Endgame after not watching a single Marvel movie in five years because of spoilers. 

Recently, I’ve found myself going to movies whose titles I hardly remember.

To be clear, I haven’t completely reformed myself. I went into my first time viewing Memento knowing the twist and still enjoyed the movie very much this year. 

But I don’t feel like I have to be spoiled to get myself to a movie.

During this wonderful summer of Barbenheimer, I limited myself to just the trailers, even though I easily could have spent an hour going through Wikipedia articles on Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project or going through countless subreddits finding leaks from Barbie.

But I didn’t.

There was definitely some self-restraint going into the movies, but it wasn’t to a degree that I felt like I was going to go insane. If anything, I was pleased with my decision.

I wish I had this moment, this epiphany I could point to where my reliance on spoilers ended. I don’t. At one point when I was at Calvin, I was looking up everything. Now I’m not. 

I’ve been thinking about writing about personal regression here for a while. How, after graduating, I’ve found myself regressing. I’m not as thoughtful; I don’t pay attention to the world around me; I don’t feel as motivated; I have no idea how to socialize.

In a lot of ways, despite things going well from a career perspective, I feel like I’m a holistically worse person than I was two years ago, and I hate that.

So why am I writing about spoilers? Is this the one thing I’ve found in my soul-searching I’ve actually progressed in?

Maybe. 

Sharing spoilers with others can irk some people, and that’s not something I’ve frequently done, but I’ve realized that I’ve missed something as I’ve started to let myself go unspoiled. 

For most of my life, outside of live sports (well, sort of, I’ll get back to this), if I watch something, I want to know what happens next. Did the character I think die actually die? Is the company that landed a deal with one of the Sharks on Shark Tank still open? What does Cole Sear see?

When we went to watch Memento at a special showing at Alamo Drafthouse, my girlfriend had no idea what the movie was about. She hadn’t even seen a trailer. After the movie, I wish I had experienced going into the movie with no idea of what was next as well.

I don’t think I let myself experience the magic of an unspoiled narrative. I was always too interested in knowing what was next that I never let myself appreciate things as they unfold.

I suppose I’m like that in my everyday life, as well. Because even in live sports, I often find myself checking MLB.com’s Gameday while I watch “live” baseball because the broadcast feeds are thirty seconds behind. 

Never mind that I could experience Spencer Strider’s sixteenth strikeout of the game in real time when I can give myself the peace of mind he got out of the eighth-inning jam before I see it happen with my own eyes.

Never mind that I could let myself just see where life takes me instead of trying to fast-forward to see where I end up.

If I could see the spoilers to my own life I don’t think I’d even know how to plan to get to what I’ve seen. I probably won’t go to Wikipedia for the next blockbuster I watch, and I guess that’s progress. 

Mitchell Barbee

Mitchell Barbee graduated from Calvin University with a B.A. in writing in 2021. Originally from Boone, North Carolina, he is currently residing in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He enjoys hanging out with the few friends who stayed, wearing grey hoodies, and hoping that he doesn’t get sucked into the nightly wormhole of watching a baseball game.