There’s a quiet crisis unfolding in classrooms, living rooms, and group chats across the country: we’re running out of things to talk about. Not because there’s less happening in the world, but because fewer people are experiencing the same things at the same time.

As an instructor to secondary school students and a college lecturer finishing up another semester, I’ve been feeling this absence acutely. What used to be easy – referencing a TV show, a film, a cultural moment we’d all lived through – has become a scavenger hunt for common ground.

The fragmentation of our media habits is eroding something vital: our shared emotional and cultural vocabulary. Streaming services and social media algorithms have gifted us infinite choice, but stolen from us the experience of watching, processing, and feeling things together. The loss isn’t just conversational – it’s communal. It’s educational. It’s emotional.

Teaching both secondary school and college students creative writing and sociology, one of the increasingly surreal challenges I face each semester is trying to find cultural references my students all share. It’s not just that I’m ageing out of their generational sphere – it’s that the idea of a “generational sphere” itself is dissolving.

The era of collective cultural moments is fading, and in its place we have a thousand fractured, personalised realities, each curated by algorithms that know what you like, but not what you need to feel connected.

When I was their age, a lecturer could mention Friends or Freaks And Geeks, Sex And The City or The West Wing, and the room would light up – students leaning in with recognition, amusement, or even frustration. These were more than TV shows; they were shared languages.

Watching Sex And The City wasn’t just about fashion and brunch – it was about parsing romantic politics, exploring feminist questions, and debating life choices with your friends in the aftermath of each episode. Freaks And Geeks wasn’t just a niche cult favourite – it gave voice to teen alienation and awkwardness in a way that felt deeply communal, shaping how we talked about identity, family and failure.

In the absence of formal education in emotional literacy, these pop-cultural narratives taught us how to feel, talk and understand each other. They gave us points of reference for who we were and who we might become.

Today, I ask my students what they’re watching and I get a scattering of replies: a Netflix true-crime docuseries, an anime I’ve never heard of, a Korean drama that doesn’t come up in anyone else’s algorithm. None of these are bad things on their own – in fact, many are brilliant. But they’re often consumed in solitude, or at best, in algorithmic micro-communities.

Even when two students mention the same show, they may be on vastly different episodes – one just starting, the other long finished. The idea of “appointment viewing” is alien. And so, increasingly, is the idea of cultural simultaneity.

And with it, so is a certain kind of emotional education. The kind you only get from seeing the same story unfold as your peers, at the same pace, and parsing it together in real time. Culture has always been a kind of mirror – but it used to be a mirror we gathered around. Now, we peer into a thousand personalised handheld screens, each showing a different reflection. We are increasingly fluent in private content, but illiterate in collective meaning.

This is more than nostalgia. It’s about the weakening of our collective emotional education. When young people no longer engage with the same stories at the same time, the opportunities for conversation, reflection, and mutual understanding shrink. We risk raising generations fluent in personalised content but illiterate in shared cultural meaning.

Cinema, at its best, resists this isolation. It demands time, space and attention. It gathers strangers in a dark room and offers them a common emotional journey. People cry in theatres together, cheer at climactic moments, and leave buzzing with thoughts they are eager to unpack over dinner or drinks.

It’s not too late to reclaim some of that shared space. Event cinema like Barbenheimer reignited some excitement around going to the cinema in large groups, and the originality of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is currently drawing groups of friends to the cinema. But we can’t rely on these accidental moments of collective cultural experience; we need to actively create them.

Campus film nights, public screenings, even structured binge-watching groups could help recreate a sense of collective rhythm. But we must also think bigger: about the social role of art, and the need to preserve spaces where we can feel things together.

Because culture isn’t just about what we consume – it’s about how we connect. And in an age of infinite choice, the hardest, most radical thing we can do is choose something together.