The end of the Harry Potter movies marks the end of an era for people in their late teens and early twenties. So many of us eagerly stood in line to buy the latest installment of the seven-part series or watch the latest movie on its opening weekend.

Now that it’s over, we’ll need to either find something new around to direct our cumulative attention to, as our parents’ generation did (with matters such as the space race), or create something of our own.

We need some aspect of popular culture to be invested in as a generation. Maybe that aspect is a widely shared viewpoint or commitment — such as the Victorians’ wholesale commitment, documented in the novels of Charles Dickens, to stable domestic situations.

But whatever that cultural phenomenon turns out to be, we should not exploit or commercialize it in every possible way as we’ve done with Harry Potter and other entertainment franchises.

In our own quest to indulge our Pottermania, we demanded more incarnations of the Boy Who Lived. Instead of being content with the lucidity of J. K. Rowling’s novels, we lusted after two- and then three-dimensional special effects.

The movie adaptations of the seventh book perfectly illustrate the insanity of our obsession. I must say “adaptations,” of course, because “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” is too long a book to be made into one movie.

Instead of accepting two different visions for two different mediums, we tried to sate our greed for experiencing the same thing again and again by demanding adaptations of as much of the source material as we could for the screen. And that inclusion robs us, as well as future generations, of something.

We’re robbed of the rich products of our imaginations when too much of a wonderful story is ripped off the page and forced on the screen. But our own generation, which grew up waiting on the new releases of the Harry Potter novels, will probably survive that theft.

I worry about my younger siblings and members of generations to come. Because the Harry Potter series has been beaten to death onscreen and in the toy aisle, it is highly possible that they will simply accept Daniel Radcliffe’s face as that of Harry Potter, or the visage of Michal Gambon (or is it to be Richard Harris?) as that of Albus Dumbledore. Children may not even realize that their beloved movies are based off written words that are even better than the film before their eyes.

Next time we — or members of any generation — find a phenomenon to obsess about, we should restrain ourselves from pillaging it in as wholesale a style as we have the Harry Potter tale.

Viewers always take something new from classic works of art, be they books, painting or films. If we’re so bent on instant sensory stimulation, what kind of legacy will we leave to our children?