Popular culture today exists mainly to entertain people in bullshit jobs. It is deliberately distracting, interchangeable, and empty of deeper meaning, because that’s all that can be digested and appreciated by people working in mindless yet demanding positions. We might refer to this type of mass culture as “palliative culture” - it is meant to numb one’s consciousness so as to ease the spiritual destruction of integrating into late capitalism. When critics today complain about the shallowness of modern pop culture, what they are really identifying is the preexisting exhaustion of pop culture’s consumers, who are rendered unable to engage meaningfully with anything outside of their jobs.

David Graeber - the originator of the term "bullshit job" - writes:

What we are witnessing is the rise of those forms of popular culture that office workers can produce and consume during the scattered, furtive shards of time they have at their disposal in workplaces where even when there’s nothing for them to do, they still can’t admit it openly.

Paisley Rekdal writes:

Literature is the expression of conflicting human desires, and reading is the activation of these conflicts, the dynamic engagement with word and idea. Perhaps I might define and identify a work of literature, then, not by whether or not it increases my empathy for others, but whether it unsettles me without a clear resolution.

Conversely, we can define and identify palliative culture by whether or not it settles the consumer.