At least 15 years ago, before social media or smartphones touched my high school English classroom,  I used to teach an essay by the British novelist Laurie Lee, called “Appetite” as part of a unit on rhetoric. 

Lee writes about appetite in terms of food, describing the Depression-era pleasure of anticipating a toffee as much better than eating it. He imagines the collective appetite of early man, waiting for hunters to return to the cave with meat where “the long-awaited meal became… an almost sacred celebration of life.” He contrasts this to the ease of modern life where food is “cheap chicken and frozen peas”, or perhaps UberEats for us.

But I keep thinking about something Lee says at the end unrelated to food: 

“Too much of anything–too much music, entertainment, happy snacks, or time spent with one’s friends–creates a kind of impotence of living by which one can no longer hear, or taste, or see, or love, or remember.”

In 2026 we seem to have “too much” of lots of things (although maybe not time with friends).  Every song we could possibly want is instantly available, paid or free out there somewhere. The same for movies, photos, and videos. In the streaming universe, everything is always ready.

As a result, I  for one can feel my appetite changing. Something is different without the hunt. I find it increasingly hard to settle on one thing, in a way I never did when I bought an album or rented a DVD. I jump from movie to movie, from song to song, because it’s just so easy to do it. Without any real investment in appetite, I nibble entertainment like it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet.

The pace of short-form scrolling social media impacts appetite in the same way. We don’t have to hunt for what’s interesting; the algorithm brings it to us, like an assembly line of digital hunters delivering meal after meal to our cave. We don’t need to do any work at all. Our curiosity stays purely reactive. Boring. Swipe. Give me more. It seems the less time we spend seeking, anticipating, being actively curious, the less it matters, and the more disposable it all becomes. 

And for students, I worry most about intellectual curiosity, because it’s hard to sustain when AI brings quick answers. More than cheating, I worry that AI might be withering intellectual curiosity, which is the appetite of the classroom. Being curious enough to want to hunt for the answer is the goal. Our job as teachers is to make sure they have opportunities to use that curiosity in our classrooms, but their obligation as students is that they keep that curiosity alive, and think of it as something that belongs in school.

Lee asks us to “respect the divinity of appetite… to keep it eager and not too much blunted.” That sounds like good advice for our digital appetites as well.

Kurt Weiler

I reflect on experiences like these in my Substack, Rethinking English at https://rethinkingenglish.substack.com

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Pair this blog post with the following:

Making Time for Engagement and Joy by Kurt Weiler

Collected Poems by Laurie Lee

5 Ways That Cell Phone Use Negatively Impacts Athletes by Andy Milne