Last month my wife and I binge watched For All Mankind on Apple+. The show was highly original, smartly written and now that we’re done with Season 4, we are stuck waiting for a new season and we miss it. This is a familiar emotion for any of us who have gotten into a new show, devoured it and then felt the angst of a new entertainment void to fill. Instead of watching that way, what if you took longer … on purpose.
I am a big Star Trek fan, but new shows from this universe on Paramount+ are ones that I end up watching alone … so I usually only watch episodes while waiting to board flights or during longer indoor cardio workouts. As a result, one season lasts me a month or two. It seems what I have been unintentionally doing is “stinge watching,” a clever new term I heard this week to describe the idea of intentionally spreading out viewing a streaming show over more time to enjoy it longer.
This isn’t exactly “the opposite of binge watching” as this article claims, since technically that would be NOT watching the show at all. Still there is some wisdom in this idea of stinge watching and giving ourselves more time to think and digest what we are watching, while also fueling our anticipation for when we will watch the next episode. Of course, I’d probably enjoy a chocolate bar more if I only ate a bit each day too. But that doesn’t make it any easier to resist temptation and do it.
Instead of Binge Watching, Why Not Try “Stinge Watching”?
