I understand that off the bat this sounds pretentious but bare with me. If life is a straight line going from left to right and we add hills for the monumental moments in life, the good, happy, joyous moments. And we add valleys for the low moments, the sad, heart breaking, depressing states we experience. What we end up with us a diverse landscape of peaks and gorges. And what’s special about this is that everyone’s is different and unique. Some people will have a mountain range and some will have more deep canyons.
I don’t think this is the case. But first let me explain something different. I didn’t declare that I would no longer be watching tv, I didn’t set myself a new years resolution or delete my Netflix account. I just stopped. And I only became aware of this when asked a question along the lines of ‘Have you watched the new episode of…?’ or ‘What show are you binging right now?’. This utterly mundane question brought be to the realisation that my life had changed.
I would’t say I was an avid tv consumer, I didn’t marathon trilogies, or rewatch my favourite movie over and over again. I probably just engaged with tv shows and movies as much as everyone else, which is still probably a little too much. I believe that the visual content of block busters, sitcoms and everything in between have a powerful element to them that I can’t put my finger on. We insult the quality of them, refer to them as trash or junk tv, yet we are enthralled by what we see. There’s nothing quite like it. We don’t eat food we don’t like the taste of. We refrain from talking to people we don’t like spending time with. So why do we engage with content that we find so easy to insult?
Don’t get me wrong, I still go to the cinema and even watch films at home on occasion. And I believe that everyone is entitled to their opinion on what they enjoy. I like movies that make me feel something. Something, regardless of good emotion or bad emotion, I want to feel something powerful. Regardless if it is the highest summit or the lowest crevice, I want to feel something. Life is too short in my eyes to waste countless hours watching tv shows that make us crack a smile once every two episodes. And I think the reason for this is because for many, tv is escapism. Most of us would rather not experience those lows in life so we run away from them and watch a distorted version of reality on tv which in turn removes the highs from life too. Most of us have open plains. Grass land with not a hill, bump, or dent in sight. We slice off the tops and bottoms of the once spiky chart and are left with nothing but the straight line we started with.
It seems we would rather numb life though this form of escapism than sacralise those moments when you laugh so hard you lose breath. We would much rather watch these moments on tv than to live them for ourselves. Which is what I can’t relate with.
I’m not claiming people shouldn’t watch what they want to watch, and not claiming that life is like this for everyone, but I don’t want my form of escapism to be scripted.
I want my form of escapism to be life.