It’s commonplace to witness people entertained.
Phones, computers, televisions — the moving picture captures our attention.
The appeal of moving images makes evolutionary sense — savage man watched the bushes, fields, hills, for any kind of movement. Whether you’re hunting for dinner or avoiding a prowler, it’s movement in the picture that you’re waiting to observe.
Television took the moving picture and made it endless.
Now everyone has a personal television in their pocket.
A television that plays exactly what you desire.
As a result, attention can be so fiercely captured that we have the pleasure of observing a fully grown human walk right into a street sign or glass door. Maybe slip down some stairs.
Hilarious.
But mostly it’s just a bunch of people who are alone together.
I guess this is more and more becoming a problem.
Scary Stats?
Ted Gioia recently cited a LUMINATE statistic that half of waking hours are devoted to entertainment.
Um, holy shit.
And that’s the average.
It’s easy to think Who cares about a bunch of people spending the majority of their waking hours entertained? Do whatever works for you. Doesn’t bother me.
Maybe that’s the issue.
Are we always so gracious with letting others do what they want?
Can you think of a single example where hedonistic tendencies led to something negative??
The Writing’s On the Screen
Neil Postman warned us of our impending doom back in the 80’s.
"...the idea that it is through technological progress that we will achieve happiness, and that therefore it is a good thing for us to adapt ourselves and change our culture to fit the needs of technology because it is on the wings of technology that we will find paradise, that in itself is a story in which many people believe."
The above interview is a shortened version, but the points Postman makes about information are eerily visible today.
Our sense of meaning is threatened.
We are drowning in information and this makes it difficult to extract any sort of meaning from information.
It’s probably easy to find examples of this in your own life.
Maybe it’s obsession with a political ideology.
Maybe it’s fervent religious insistence in an attempt to prevent your inevitable, eternal destruction.
Maybe it’s just plain old meaninglessness (uh, young men??).
The potential manifestations of this issue are endless. Especially considering how consumed by entertainment we all are.
Postman doesn’t leave us hanging though. He offers a solution.
Education.
People need to be educated about the technology they are using so that it’s easier to become aware of the technology itself. By becoming aware of the technology it’s easier to create distance between yourself and the technology, better resisting total-techno-destruction.
Education makes it easier to create distance between yourself and the technology.
This is where addiction comes in.
Where the toxicity of social media enters the picture.
Where our ideas of the world lock horns with the actual world around us.
How Did We Get So Consumed?
In A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997), David Foster Wallace tells us about the perfect storm that is Homo sapian and television.
TV is perfect for our species
We love to watch other people but hate being watched ourselves (for the most part).
Might be a major reason why porn is so successful, no?
TV offers us a dreamy promise of escape.
It tempts you by saying —Life is more interesting here. Be sure to come back next episode.
Oh the temptations.
And you might think whatever, it’s just our voyeuristic tendency…
But what we do as hunters or warriors or spies or fetishists is espial:
the act of watching someone else without their knowing we’re watching.
This has change into something altogether different due to television.
Today when we watch someone on a screen they are fully aware of the fact that they are being watched. Movie stars, YouTubers, and the like, find their value in the number of eyes watching.
We are no longer the voyeur.
We have turned into the viewer.
Viewers crave performance and spectacle.
Viewers submit to clickbait.
Viewers give the views.
And with viewership comes a volatile illusion:
Viewers watch performers with perfect bodies, living in a state of perfect hilarity where everything works out sublimely, only to wonder why aren’t I like that?
This happened with TV sitcoms and movies, and now it’s happening with content creators. The major difference being accessibility — there’s is nothing can stop you now.
Except yourself.
Alarmist or Pragmatist?
No portion of my concern is devoted to wasted hours or the rotting brains created by consuming entertainment. There is a lot of useful entertainment out there.
There’s also a lot of fun, amusing entertainment, and I for one will never stop watching FAIL videos.
Though I may agree with Frank Zappa that entertainment produces more shit than worthwhile stuff, entertainment is here to stay (remember, half of waking hours are spent being entertained).
The difficulty with this topic is pinpointing a target and justifying why. It’s not as simple as pointing a finger at content creators, TV stations, and the like, only to walk away a blameless viewer — a victim.
The issue here is worship.
In a commencement speech given to graduating seniors at Kenyon College, David Foster Wallace explains the true importance of an education —
Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and how you construct meaning.
-David Foster Wallace
What you pay attention to is what you worship.
Only YOU get to decide what you worship.
And for those who would argue that a life of worship is a life of servitude and the path of the fallen angel, Satan, who said I will not serve is the way to go.
You’re still worshipping. There’s no way around it.
We are an animal that searches for meaning, and that meaning will come one way or another.
If meaning is coming to you through money, power, fame, sexuality, beauty, intellect, or any other fleeting example, then, as David Foster Wallace put it —
It will eat you alive.
What you worship can easily consume you.
It can destroy you.
Or it can empower you.
Empowered and Entertained
Most importantly, your search for meaning is where the examination of YOUR life comes into play.
If you’re focused on power and beauty and money and fame and all that intoxicating, alluring stuff, when will you have time to consider and reflect on your self?
What questions will go unanswered for the sake of what you’ve chosen to worship?
The only way to find what’s worth worshipping is to carefully choose what you’d like to pay attention to. Yet our attention is so easily usurped.
It happens when people go on a date but spend time on their phones instead.
Or when it’s easier to ignore the world passing around you for the memes and videos in your feed.
Or when waiting for a table at a restaurant is so boring that you need something to eat up that wait time.
I visited Kansas City, MO once and met a couple new friends through Couchsurfing: Sharita and David. We went out to eat and David happened to have forgotten his wallet. Not like, Oops I forgot my wallet so you can pay, just a simple misplacement. I told him not to worry about it and that it’s a pleasure to be able to buy lunch for a new friend. He would not accept this.
He offered to take me out for lunch the next day in order to make up for it. Whenever someone feels the need to settle up, I don’t argue. I’ll tell you that it’s ok and there’s no need to square up, but only once. After that I’ll ask where we’re going.
We met up the next day and walked to a Kansas City BBQ place. When we got to the restaurant the host told us it would be a couple minutes before the table was ready. I decided to wander around the entrance and read the articles written about the restaurant, see who of notable stardom had visited, and admire the boring, contemporary decor.
When the host called us a few minutes later, David was looking at me. He said something along the lines of “you’re always comfortable, huh?”
I was a little unsure what he meant.
He continued, “You just do your own thing.”
If I don’t do my own thing, then what am I doing?
Well, I guess I’d be doing what most people are doing — entertaining myself.
Entertaining yourself slowly becomes emulation.
Entertaining yourself casually becomes mirroring.
Entertaining yourself gradually becomes doing someone else’s thing.
Then all of a sudden you’re living an unexamined life and Socrates is sounding almost prophetic.
I think it’s reasonable to say that entertainment offers an unexamined life. It’s much simpler to observe someone else’s life and apply their beliefs, understandings, tautologies, aphorisms, etc., to your own.
It’s a pre-packaged way of being.
Someone has already taken it for a spin.
A pre-owned life to try on and… maybe commit.
Sounds confused to me.
I’d rather worship the randomness of my intertwined existence.
Observe the struggle to worship my love, my way.
And carry with me the scars I’ve worked so hard to earn.
Having enough control to distance yourself from the things that entertain you is a superpower. It grants you control over your attention and allows you to truly examine what you see as worth worshipping.
That which is worth worshipping transcends the common value assumptions. It doesn’t get stuck on money, intellect, fame, power, or any destructive forces.
My recommendation, if you haven’t embraced a higher power, is to worship qualities that build and grow. Kindness, caring, and love are very beneficial ways-of-being and focus on worshipping the goodness that’s possible.
Religion, when considered properly, is just a shortcut to worshipping goodness. It’s all the same shit repackaged and resold to different people. But we’re so preoccupied with power, history, misinterpretation, and so on, that the battles rage on.
I mean war and destruction are way more entertaining than peace and love, I guess.
Or is the issue that…