After nearly three hours of Netflix-ing in procrastination, your vision is blurred and burnt out. Your feels are on the reels. In the back of your mind, a small voice of responsibility weakly reminds you, you have a five page paper due in less that 12 hours. That’s less that a day. You search the internet relentlessly for the book you didn’t even bother to buy for the class because Rate My Professor said you wouldn’t need it. There has to be a PDF somewhere. The ticking clock in your brain starts to zoom by as hours dissolve and your blurred-out vision laser focuses on the seemingly ever shrinking Microsoft Word file with it’s taunting, blinking cursor as if it’s saying, “You really don’t have anything to write, do you?”
My father loves to remind me that we rarely have time to do something right, but always have time to do it twice. I like this expression because it so passive aggressively challenges my inherent procrastination that everyone indulges on what seems to be a regular basis (especially in college). But, getting one’s work done early and on time is so difficult. To willingly sit down at the computer and type out a paper (one I really couldn’t give a f*ck about. I’m sorry but the implication of 14th century mosaics on modern sexism is not something I would ever care to analyze) requires so much will power because there are so many more fun and enjoyable things I could be doing instead. In our modern conception of the culture of ease and recreation, work becomes not an expression of skill and identity, but a begrudging obligation to enable those recesses which we routinely indulge to satisfy ourselves.
Back in the olden days, people didn’t have fun toys like computers or phones that could access any piece of media in the history of man to ogle. They had sticks. Sticks. You try using a stick to make a eight-season-long television show filled with important characters that you can relate to. If so, ABC would like to have a conversation with you. You know what you can do with a stick? Throw it.
Despite this crude reduction, people in the past had stories, but those stories came in a leather bound book that said if you touch yourself at night you’re going to hell or if you eat lobster, you’re going to burn for all eternity (Sorry, Maine).
Nowadays, because of technological (TV/Computers), educational (Literacy/Critical Thinking), and economic developments (Rising Disposable Income/Productivity), we have a supreme glut of entertainment, of fictional universes, to explore at and for our leisure (none of which have the same guilt pangs as mentioned before). Why bother doing work, when I can spend all my time catching up on the 50 billion+ TV shows I have on Netflix. Then, I don’t have to do anything! I can just slip away into a fantasy world where I can watch people I don’t have to invest any energy to know and love.
Many people think this change is a bad thing. It is easy to characterize these arguments as old foggies who can’t get with the times, but to do so would be reductive and wouldn’t answer the central premise of their challenge: that the glut of available quality entertainment is pulling us away from the beauty of real life. And also that entertainment is fake and artificial. However, on the second point, something being fake or artificial isn’t necessarily an indictment. Society often uses artificial constructs to manufacture order and stability through things like crime and punishment, which I would argue is a good thing for the most part. On the first point, for most of human existence, real life was really terrible for the majority of the population. Slaves, serfs, “working masses,” etc. all lived horrible degrading lives spending most of their time doing dull repetitive tasks for nearly no pay and no agency over their lives. Escape was necessary to give some modicum of reason for these oppressed people to live. Whether it be art or religion, the downtrodden needed some way to give their lives more meaning in the face of mass dehumanization and squalid conditions.
However, our lives today feature an astoundingly higher degree of quality of life. On every empirical level, we are doing better: lifespan, education, freedoms (arguably), food security, water quality. What is it exactly that we are escaping from? Clean toilets?
Our frame of reference, in terms of judgment, is relatively small. For most people that have never experienced the comparatively terrible lives of our ancestors, the problems of today (job security, determination of what’s “right,” getting everything you need, etc.) seem as equally torturous, which is perfectly natural. It’s hard to conceptualize or experience all the starving hungry kids in the world since we probably (most of us) won’t ever experience that horrible misfortune. Not to mention, most of the terrible reality of the past still persists. A lot of people work dull, repetitive jobs for not a lot of money, and with little agency or control of what happens to us. Sure, the magnitude is different, but it’s the same paradigm. The only thing that has really changed is that we can now stream millions of television shows at will. So, who’s going to stop us? Ourselves?
