this sounds a lot like what i went through with movies a few years ago (or maybe am still going through, it's hard to tell). at some point after i got my masters i started to really notice that movies, these things that had defined both my intellectual work and how i spent my free time for more or less my entire adult life, just did not make me feel like they used to anymore. not even that they had become less interesting necessarily, just that *something* had changed while i wasn't paying attention. i think it's like, a blank page is infinite possibility, right, but once you start writing words down things become very constrained very fast, and i think something similar happens with reading words (or looking at images) – the possibility of a text becomes, after being read, the fact of it, and as you accumulate those facts they begin, slowly, incompletely, to define the contours of the possibilities of all texts, and eventually your awareness of these contours is going to start affecting how you read texts in the first place. if that makes sense. anyway, i haven't stopped watching movies or anything, but i have had to learn to be okay with experiencing them in a way that will usually feel more distant and abstract than it used to. i found that watching a lot of stuff that had almost no "story" to speak of, stuff where the subject was really just images themselves more than anything, helped with this a lot, because it kind of let me get back to basics and be like, okay, if i can't watch stuff "the old way" way anymore, what other kinds of viewing are there. maybe reading some concrete poetry, or work that's similarly text-as-text oriented, might be useful for you? getting serious about my fiction/poetry definitely helped me as well, but ymmv.
this sounds a lot like what i went through with movies a few years ago (or maybe am still going through, it's hard to tell). at some point after i got my masters i started to really notice that movies, these things that had defined both my intellectual work and how i spent my free time for more or less my entire adult life, just did not make me feel like they used to anymore. not even that they had become less interesting necessarily, just that *something* had changed while i wasn't paying attention. i think it's like, a blank page is infinite possibility, right, but once you start writing words down things become very constrained very fast, and i think something similar happens with reading words (or looking at images) – the possibility of a text becomes, after being read, the fact of it, and as you accumulate those facts they begin, slowly, incompletely, to define the contours of the possibilities of all texts, and eventually your awareness of these contours is going to start affecting how you read texts in the first place. if that makes sense. anyway, i haven't stopped watching movies or anything, but i have had to learn to be okay with experiencing them in a way that will usually feel more distant and abstract than it used to. i found that watching a lot of stuff that had almost no "story" to speak of, stuff where the subject was really just images themselves more than anything, helped with this a lot, because it kind of let me get back to basics and be like, okay, if i can't watch stuff "the old way" way anymore, what other kinds of viewing are there. maybe reading some concrete poetry, or work that's similarly text-as-text oriented, might be useful for you? getting serious about my fiction/poetry definitely helped me as well, but ymmv.