I'm now employed full-time again for five months. I like the job and the job likes me, it's chill but not boring, it plays to my strengths. As I filled up my savings, I also leveraged the enjoyment boosting effect of prepayment for consumption, namely I bought:
Last week I went to The Furious (big recommend) and Scary Movie 6 (mid, but no regrets). It's nice to sit in an air conditioned cinema when it's 35C and beyond outside, but watching movies is kinda unfulfilling to me overall. Contrast that with live plays. I don't think I've ever been bored at a play, even ones where the story is much less interesting on paper than some of the movies I watched.
This comes down to what I value in media and what I don't. Plays are all about their dialogue and emotion, they have a limited ability to transform the stage and dress up. In a movie you'll often have a larger budget just for special effects than the entire yearly budget of my local theater. But I don't go to the cinema to marvel at the music, I barely care about music at all, I don't particularly care about the advances, or really regressions, of CGI either. I care about the story. Actually no, I don't care about the story, I care about the characters.
You can write me a play of 3 people in a room disliking each other and I'll enjoy it more than the lord of the rings. (That's jean-paul sartre - no exit) Also, I'll like seeing this as a play more than reading it, and reading it more than viewing it as a movie. If you only care about the human element, a movie is distracting by nature. The music, the elaborate scenes, the editing, the effects, the actors saying their lines just a little too perfect, it's all superfluous and a detriment.
Perhaps this just comes down to being a wordcel, meaning I think and process the world almost entirely through language. Now to preempt the shaperotators: I don't have aphantasia, I can mentally visualize pretty well, I'd be a 2 on the apple test If you don't know what any of this means, look it up, it's pretty interesting. And go see/read a play.