I love spoiling the plot for myself. It’s something I do fairly regularly. Before watching a film, I tend to open Wikipedia and read the entire plot synopsis. If every episode of a series has been uploaded to a streamer, I often open the last episode, watch the final five minutes, close it and then start from the beginning. I did as such when the final season of Top Boy dropped in the autumn of 2023. When I tweeted about it from my now-deleted X account, I drew a range of bewildered and outraged responses, including from the official Top Boy Netflix account.

I’m sure you also probably think I’m a sociopath, a philistine or stubbornly impatient (the last has some truth). But the fact is, sometimes spoilers relieve a sense of burden – that you might have to stick out some film or TV show with this uncertainty hanging over you, this itch to just know who gets snuffed out or who did the snuffing. Isn’t that the point of watching something, I hear you say. Well, yes. But frankly, I’m not willing to put that effort into every bit of media I consume – particularly in the streaming age where there is such a constant abundance of things to watch, all of it varying in quality, and the pay-off is not always guaranteed.

I find that knowing what happens brings a different kind of pleasure to the viewing experience, too. You feel like you’re one step ahead of the characters, and you point out the bits of foreshadowing and feel pleased with yourself. The ancient Greeks often knew how tragedies were going to end from the onset; early on in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, it is prophesied that Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother, and the entertainment comes from watching him unknowingly hurtle towards his destiny.

Sometimes, plot points have been spoiled simply because the text is so old that everyone publicly discusses it anyway. I watched Cruel Intentions for the first time the other weekend, to my mind an unfairly maligned teen film, having already seen the thrilling conclusion with Kathryn Merteuil’s character, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, exposed at the funeral of her stepbrother, Sebastian Valmont. Knowing what happened at the end didn’t make the downfall any less exquisite; if anything, Kathryn’s repeated cruelty made me even more excited for it. And I think old art is the best case for why spoilers are sometimes good – if you’ve repeatedly watched something and your enjoyment hasn’t diminished, then surely it’s about the writing and entertainment rather than the big reveals?

Now don’t get me wrong – I don’t believe in spoiling things for other people, and would never casually post plot twists or key scenes on my social media. I think that’s a bizarrely selfish practice. And I won’t read spoilers for everything – whenever I watch a new film in the cinema, I don’t bring out my phone to Google the plot, because I think there’s a sanctity to the theatrical experience. Perhaps this all speaks to how streaming has cheapened our consumption habits; if you’re watching a series on your phone, why not read up on it at the same time on the same screen? Who knows, but anyway, I’m about to go Google whether or not Leonardo DiCaprio survives at the end of Titanic.

• Jason Okundaye is an assistant opinion editor at the Guardian and the author of Revolutionary Acts