Few days back I told GZ who had recommended me Steins;Gate anime based on my interest in science that I had watched it and I liked it, and asked him if there are other anime like this, and he recommended me to watch Dark which is a TV series not an anime (because it also involves time travel). I told him I had watched the first season, but I did not like it. He was really astounded, and so I explained. Dark is a really good TV series actually from all aspects but one. It's cinematography, acting, music, direction, all of the things are top-class. When they do depiction of old timeline from 60s or 80s, that too has been done excellently. Most people do not consciously think about these things, but it takes consideration of multitudes of factors to make a movie or TV series give that certain effect that it has, and Dark had that effect. But the single thing that didn't click to me was the core story. SPOILER AHEAD. The core story, at-least of the first season, was revolving around a town of people constantly cheating over one another. I'm sure they would have developed the story further in the next seasons, but the one for first season wasn't interesting enough for me to continue on. Now, the core story makes one element of the multiple of elements, and if let's say I intended to learn cinematography or film-direction, I maybe wouldn't have bothered about it. But in general, it seems I have something that I would henceforth call first filter which outright eliminates some options out of the table regarding things I might be spending time on. I will explain more about what it means later. So, the core story of a piece of creative work sort of acts as a first filter for content I would want to consume. I probably wouldn't have coined a new term for this if it was just about this, but as I was having my dinner few minutes ago, a pattern popped up in my mind, because I had applied a similar rule on a different thing as well. A little while ago, maybe one or two months, someone had asked me about potentially working with a specific FinTech company and I just started analyzing that company to understand what it actually does. So, their core product was basically a mobile app for saving committee but when I looked into it, it was just a credit app disguised as a savings committee app. It had much better UX and credit terms than most of the other credit apps, but this idea just couldn't settle with me, that they are a credit app but they disguise themselves as a savings committee app. It might not seem that much of a problematic thing to most, but to me, it certainly is. Their targeted userbase belongs to a culture where borrowing on interest is disallowed by their religion. What the company is essentially doing by this branding, is extending credit to those people who do not wish to borrow money because of their religious ideology or whatever, by tricking them into thinking that it's not credit. I probably wouldn't have a problem if it was just a credit app as my problem here is not any specific religious ideology, but the fact that the company does not respect its customers' religious ideology -- it's like a restaurant that serves alcohol in name of non-alcoholic beverage to a Muslim or serves beef in name of chicken to a Hindu. Anyways, I was just casually asked about this company and it was not like a job offer or something, so it was just something that popped up while I was trying to figure out the business model of that company. But after this thinking, I was certain, that this was not a company where I would like to work, essentially because it failed the first filter. Probably, more examples might up come up in my mind, but based on this, this is the basic idea of first filter. There are a lot of criterion and variables based on which one decides and prioritizes between several options, but there are some things, the presence of which just outright eliminates an option out of consideration; that specific thing is the first filter. Now, since first filter is what eliminates an option regardless of how much it desirability it has in other aspects, it means that first filter is and should be only applied on a problem regarding some core idea. For instance, with the first example, the core plot is the core point of the whole film or series (unless you are watching for specific reasons like learning cinematography) and if that feels sickening to me, I just don't bother with it, and with the second example, the core idea of a product company is what their product is, and if that product is sold around a deception, it doesn't make sense for me to work at such company. As I mentioned one could be watching a series to learn cinematography, one might also work at a company for some very specific reasons, and in that case he might not bother about the core business of the company. For things like work, these specific reasons do not exist for long-term, so I think it is a good idea to decide not to work at a place where you feel problem with the core idea of their whole business.