Chipping away so much left me with a lot of free time that I had no idea what to do with. I was suddenly one of those old guys whose wife of 60 years had died, so he dies too because he doesn't know what else to do. With less of everything in my life, I'd be done catching up on everything hours before I used to. But I wasn't programmed to see that as an opportunity to get more sleep. "Great!" I thought. "Now that I don't have to stay up till 4 a.m. catching up on The Walking Dead, I can finally get around to reading every Batman comic published since 1939!"

Addiction runs in my family. My grandfather was addicted to gambling, my dad was addicted to alcohol, and I was addicted to YouTube clips of 1990s Conan O'Brien. Every generation has their struggles. Mine are just dumber. Still, it felt good shedding myself of all the extra layers of distraction. It was like shitting day-after hot wings I didn't even know I ate.

Once the shock started to wear off, I established a new rule. Actually, a few of them.

We're in the Golden Age of ... well, everything. Which makes sense, since there's so much more of everything being produced. Some of it is bound to be incredible, some of it will end up bad, but a the overwhelming majority is so mediocre that talking about it with actual words does it a disservice. Only primitive guttural sounds of indifference like "Meh," "Eh," and "Blah" feel adequate. I was watching, reading, playing way too much ... stuff. So I created some new rules for myself:

1) If I don't see a shred of potential by the middle of the first season, a show is dead to me.

2) A movie has 30 minutes to invest me in its story. If it doesn't, it's stopped and its runtime is filled with a YouTube montage of Schwarzenegger one-liners.

3) If after 50 pages, I still don't know what's going on in a book because it's not interesting enough for me to remember, it's getting sold for a penny on Amazon and listed as kindling.

They all share a common theme: I don't care what the author/showrunner/director has to say after a slow or dull start. I know it can take time for some projects to find their voice, for the actors to settle into their roles, for the writers to understand how to write for the actors. I just don't want to wait around while they figure it out. I'm trying to live a life here, and all forms of entertainment keep saying, "OK, give me a sec. I almost got i- AH s**t I DON'T GOT IT." When you figure it out, make sure you let me know through one of my friends so I can give them the slip with the old "I'll get to it soon" routine and then proceed to never watch it, as originally planned.

I don't even recognize some of them as humans anymore, even though I still consider most of them to be exquisitely written characters. I can still like a song even if it's being played so loud that my ears are bleeding. But if every song I liked were played that loud, after a while I'd stop listening to music altogether until the people with their fingers on the volume knobs are tackle-teabagged into dust.

I had to stop watching House Of Cards early on when it reduced itself to a bunch of Snidely Whiplashes tying damsels to train tracks all across Washington, D.C. I don't have the patience for an entire series of Shakespearean morality plays about sociopathic power-hungry maniacs seizing power. At least Game Of Thrones has the decency to toss some dragons and vagina demons in to mix things up.

Cards is the easy example. Let's look at a comedy: It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia. It's been on the air since the Carter administration, and it's still funny and exceptionally written. But every character had their volume turned up to 11 with the knob broken off about seven seasons ago. The trillions of characters throughout the Marvel and DC cinematic universes fall into the same trap. I can't even point out specific examples, because the list of unrelatable over-the-top characters is "all of them." Not just because they have superpowers, but also because the side we're supposed to empathize with doesn't exist in an actual human world. Even Downton Abbey can sometimes be so passive-aggressive yet melodramatically bitchy that it feels like a season of Real Housewives staring imperial officers from Star Wars.

Before you fly off the handle, you need to understand that I'm not saying these shows are bad. I'm not insulting you for liking them. I'm saying that when I cut out most of the pop culture from my life, this cartoonish aspect of every character shot out at me like Johnny Crotchlight's crotch beam (still the most underrated Marvel character, in my book). The blown-up personalities are fun, and they keep us coming back just to see what zany antics they'll get up to next, but step away from them for more than a few minutes, and all you can see is Wile E. Coyote saving the world.

But take that away, and I was kind of dumbfounded. It turns out that -- at least for me -- having a conversation without that sort of catalyst was hard. It took practice. And a whole lot of apologizing to my friends for the lack of Schwarzenegger.