So entertained it hurts: The bottomless hunger for entertainment
Channel: Quest for a Meaningful Life
Date: 2021-06-13

We 21st century people seem to have a bottomless hunger for entertainment.
We just want to be entertained, and taken on an exciting journey, and we want to be fed exciting, stimulating things, seemingly at all times.
We are so heavily stimulated that it's even hard to imagine just sitting down and listening to the birds.
Some kind of very simple thing, it can almost seem painful when we're expecting high-speed, highly edited video, and professionally produced sound, and we're being fed excitement at all times.
We have even this kind of evolutionary system of entertainment where there's thousands and thousands of content producers, they're all producing entertainment for us, and the ones that are most successful rise the top, and they're selected by the algorithms, and rise to the top of our feeds.
And you see with each new platform coming out, it's even more condensed in its stimulation.
You see like TikTok, where you have these little short clips, highly produced, and everything is coming at you at high speed, and the best rise to the top, the most exciting.
And so we're so plugged in to these sources of entertainment, that how can we even enjoy life without them?
How can we enjoy just like sitting in the park or whatever, going for a walk, these kind of simple things.
Now, maybe this is an extreme picture.
I'm sure many of you still enjoy going for a walk.
It hasn't been completely lost.
Although I bet many of you will be listening to a podcast while going for a walk, which is also nice.
But it's just so hard to to be entertained now.
We just need to have more and more coming in.
So I like to imagine: what would it be like if we didn't have so much stimulation coming in?
What if we allowed ourselves to be a little bit bored?
At least bored in the sense of understimulated.
The idea that we don't need to be excited at all times.
We can actually have some kind of a calm and uneventful moment.
I mean, even saying that, it sounds so boring.
Have an uneventful hour, an uneventful day.
Sounds almost unbearable.
I'm sure after a few minutes, certainly a few hours, I'll be looking for some kind of distraction, something to provide interest.
And there seems to be something wrong with that.
And it's not against the entertainment itself, because there's a lot of quality stuff.
I mean, sure, there's filler that is just dumb stuff that occupies our attention, kind of like that catchy song that gets stuck in your head even though you hate it.
A lot of entertainment's like that.
But there is also a lot of quality, and there's a lot of interesting things going on that we can experience, and it can be very artfully designed and presented to us.
And so it's quality.
There's a lot of quality there.
But we're just so overfed with it, that if you made it a food analogy, it's like we are feeding ourselves on very rich food.
We're dining on foie gras or whatever.
And so we can't- when we have a day that's just meat and potatoes, it's like "What is this?
This is unbearably bland."
And so I think that's what we're seeing, this kind of dark side of being so well entertained, is that when you pull the plug on that entertainment, when you don't have it, or any any time of our day that we don't have it, there's just this kind of an empty feeling, because we're so used to being filled with it.
So I like to imagine: what would it be like without that?
Is it possible to turn down some of this entertainment, to take a break, to live life in a simple, "boring"
state of mind?
And is it possible to have this kind of non-stimulated, non-excited, everyday, simple existence?
Is it possible to have that without being bored?
Can we get there?
Or do we have to just go further and further into better entertainment?
I'd be curious to hear what you think.

#tooentertained #toomuchentertainment #entertainmentoverload