Why You Shouldn’t Settle for Shallow Entertainment
By: Kristina Hemzacek
Tags: Philosophy, Books, Self, Self Improvement, Reading

Why You Shouldn’t Settle for Shallow Entertainment

A case for reading difficult books.

Photo by Giammarco Boscaro on Unsplash

I was always the kid who preferred to stay home and read rather than go outside and play. Other people were confusing and the outside world always fell short to the adventures I could have with a good book.

I read a lot. For my 13th birthday, I got 14 books by R. L. Stine, which I read in a week (they’re not very long). If you’ve never heard of him, he’s like Stephen King for teens. An extremely prolific writer (he published over 300 books so far) that writes horror. The books themselves are very much in the “young adult fiction” realm so they’re pretty easy and fun to read (if you’re into scary stories). And, over time, I moved away from YA into classics and then, with my studies, serious non-fiction books.

You may notice that I categorise books into “good” and “serious”, meaning that there is also “bad” and… “trivial”. All of those words are loaded with meaning. The first two would probably be seen as positive and the other two as negative. That is not how I see it though.

Good and Bad Books

There are fiction books which are extremely well-written, intricate, poetic. They carry deep meaning and strong messages. These are books that are usually considered “good”. They are usually also regarded as classics. Books that are written by writers like William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Mikhail Lermontov, Virginia Woolf, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, George Orwell, Harper Lee, Umberto Eco, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie…

They are the works that make your mind at peace. As Helena Bonham Carter said about poetry, in an interview with Jolyon Connell:

“Reading a poem just makes me feel better. It calms my nerves if I’m nervous. Or makes me happy if I’m sad. It just expresses what you can’t necessarily express.”

Good prose, in my opinion, does the same.

Then there are also books that are usually considered “not so good”. Books that are written for children or young adults, that are not that well-written or intricate, but are still fun to read. They are still able, if not transport us to another realm, at least distract us from the world around us.

As I said earlier, I do think there is such a thing as “good” and “bad” (or “not so good”) prose, regardless of how unpopular this opinion may be these days. We are meant to treat everything as if it were on equal ground, simply because (to borrow a term from Marie Kondo) it brings us joy.

We are all meant to adhere to the idea attributed to Jeremy Bentham (a British utilitarian) that “poetry is not better than push-pin”. Push-pin is a game played by boys in 19th century Britain, but it is used as a symbol of undignified pleasure. A pleasure you might get from, for example, reading “bad” prose.

I keep using quotation marks around the words good and bad because I don’t use them to signify some kind of moral superiority. There is nothing inherently bad about enjoying any kind of writing (or any creative or artistic works). I do very much adhere to Marie Kondo’s idea that we should only keep (and do) things that bring us joy. Even if they are, in fact, undignified things. Not everything we do should be dignified.

At the same time, I do think we all should aim to do more dignified things as well.

Consumerism and the Need for Shallow Entertainment

I am deeply aware of the baggage that the words I am using have. Accusing (and it is, of course, an accusation not a statement) someone of being shallow means accusing them of only being interested in silly, unimportant, trivial (here is that word again) things. No one wants to be perceived as shallow. Importantly, we care less about being than being perceived.

The reality is that we enjoy being shallow. We enjoy silly, unimportant, trivial things. And how could we not? In the last 30 years, we went from having a few sources of news that come in the form of either a daily newspaper or evening news, which showed us a select few events from around the world, to having 24/7 live streams of constant updates from thousands of news sources. We are bombarded by sensible, important, serious (and often dreadful) news all the time.

We don’t want art with deep meaning or strong messages. We don’t want to have to work to be entertained. Reading a book takes more effort than watching Netflix (not that there is anything wrong with occasionally watching Netflix).

A lot of people have lost and are currently losing the ability of deep focus. A lot of people are now addicts, but their addiction is socially acceptable. Having a smartphone in your hand hardly looks as dangerous as having a needle. Some would argue that this is because it is hardly as dangerous, but that would be to relativise the fact that the internet is changing our brains in ways we still don’t fully understand.

We do know that teenagers and young adults today are plagued with mental health problems. Anxiety in children and teens has gone up 20% between 2007 and 2012 and between 2007 and 2017 the suicide rate of children and teens has doubled. This is one of the many topics covered in a recently published documentary “Childhood 2.0” on the dangers of social media for children and teens.

This is not to say that the internet is inherently bad, but rather that people have jumped in headfirst without understanding both how it works and what it does to our brains, to our mental health, to our sense of self.

This is also often reflected here on Medium with writing advice. Writers are advised to only use short sentences, to use simple words and phrases, to use a lot of white space so as to “let their readers breathe”, and to keep to fun and easy topics. Heaven forfends a reader might be in danger of using their brain.

This is not a critique of the people who are sharing this advice (I understand that this is what sells, so to speak), but rather of the system that not only enables but encourages this kind of consumption. This is not a fault of any individual, it is simply the product of the world we live.

In a masterful 4-part documentary created by Adam Curtis called “The Century of the Self”, we learn about the use of psychoanalysis in managing the public. People, it is proposed by psychoanalysts, are inherently deeply irrational and they should be guided from above. The only way democracy (if you then would call it that) can be saved is by having an elite class of technocratic rulers and a disengaged wider population. A population whose attention is diverted by shallow entertainment.

Looking at the world today, it would appear that they were not unsuccessful. It is doubtful though that they could have predicted the internet and how impactful it could be on spreading (and making people dependent on) shallow entertainment.

Some could argue that this is not inherently a bad setup: there is a handful of people in charge of all public affairs while the rest of the people go about their life and do the things that bring them joy.

Most, though, would probably not be so inclined. At least normatively. A person might enjoy not having to worry about public affairs and having their lives uninterrupted by the dreary business of politics, but at the same time, they would want certain provisions.

If you live in the West (and most of the world today has been influenced by this ideological system), you will have grown up to be indoctrinated to believe freedom, justice, and equality are important values. And not only are they important values, your life would be less fulfilled, less worthwhile if you did not have these ensured.

You may mind my use of the word “indoctrinated”. It’s usually associated with negative meaning. To be indoctrinated is to accept beliefs uncritically. You might think that one cannot be indoctrinated in a democracy. But like all other “negative” words used thus far, I do not use this one with the intent of moral judgement. To be indoctrinated is to grow up in society.

Most of us have certain beliefs which we accept uncritically. They are given to us or legitimised in some way by certain authorities. Our schools, the “good” or “serious” books we read, the media.

There is a certain “good” life or the skeleton of a “good” life that many people believe in. Perhaps it could be called “the American dream” or “the empire of freedom” (if you are a Marxist) or “eudaimonia” (if you are into Greek philosophy)… all of these share certain concepts which most people globally now hold as self-evidently “good”: freedom, democracy (as in people being involved with the ruling or governing of themselves), rule of law, independence, equality, etc. These also include having access to (as well as, in some cases, the sales of) goods and services. Goods and services not unlike this piece of content.

We don’t question or critically assess our lives and our values very often. It is time-consuming, tiring, and it often feels useless. Due to how much and how often we are bombarded with information about the world, it is easy to feel small. To feel powerless. Overwhelmed.

In a previous text, I talked about anxiety in the postmodern age. The dizziness of freedom one gets from not being trapped into grand narratives and the feeling of overwhelm at having so many choices.

One response to that can be (as it often is) to simply immerse yourself in shallow entertainment. And, again, there is nothing inherently wrong with that. But if you want to feel powerful, if you want to feel as if you are in control of yourself and your life, shallow entertainment will not do.

Reading Difficult Books

To return to the beginning. I love reading. I love fiction which transports me into a different world. I love the humid, warm and orange world of magical glass that melts in the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I love the sad and lonely black velvet of unhappy families of Leo Tolstoy. I love the exhilarating and conspicuous murder and paranormal mysteries of R. L. Stine.

I also love historical books. Biographies, memoirs. And scientific books. Philosophy. I love finding expressed that which I could not necessarily express myself. Either because I had no words or no understanding or concepts to describe it.

“Good” books contain knowledge and meaning. They teach us nuance and critical thinking. They challenge us, our values, and our view of the world. They provide deep insights into the world around us. Because this world was not built in the last 30 years. It is a consequence of a long line of thinking, deliberating, and creating.

If your goal is, like mine, to understand the world around you and your place in that world, you need to read “good” and “serious” books. You need to read difficult books. Books that cannot be read by the dozen per week.

This doesn’t mean that you will have to give up shallow entertainment entirely. Just that you will need to divide your time in a different way. To break yet another rule of writing on Medium, I will introduce new information in the closing section.

An average teenager spends seven hours a day on their phone ingesting content online. That is along with school work and sleeping. That number is roughly the same for adults, who spend around seven hours staring at a screen daily (a little less than four hours on their phone and another three and a half watching tv).

Imagine if only half of that time every day was spend reading difficult books. No psychoanalyst could ever accuse us of being inherently irrational and needing guidance. We would be in complete control of ourselves, our lives, and our world.