the.com/binge
the art of pretending one more episode is a reasonable plan at 3am
means To indulge in something — eating, drinking, or watching TV — to wild excess in a single concentrated burst.
from An old English dialect word from the East Midlands, where 'binge' meant to soak a wooden vessel in water to swell its planks and seal the gaps. From a thoroughly soaked barrel it was a short, soggy leap to a thoroughly soaked person: by the 19th century 'binge' had come to mean a heavy drinking bout, and from there it kept absorbing — food, shopping, and eventually whole seasons of television at 3am.
- word origin
- once meant soaking a wooden cask in water
- streaming bait
- autoplay countdowns engineered to kill your willpower
- the term
- coined for marathon TV around 2003
- brain trick
- cliffhangers exploit a craving called the Zeigarnik effect
tiger king netflix series — 2020 docuseries that became a cultural phenomenon with 64 million household views in first month
stranger things season 4 — 2022 netflix release watched by 1.35 billion hours in first 28 days, defining binge culture
breaking bad final season — 2013 amc series finale that drove unprecedented streaming binge-watching behavior