The Culture of Entertainment
A culture of celebrity and the struggle for attention
“Where self-indulgence has ruined both the body and mind, nothing seems bearable, not because the task is hard but because the one doing it is soft.”
-Seneca
The writer David Foster Wallace grew up in a house of books. He turned to those books as a child as they were, as he would tell the journalist David Lipsky, a “conversation around loneliness.” It was from this relationships with books that would lead him to read thousands of them and eventually begin writing his own, including Infinite Jest which went on to be named one of the greatest American novels of the last hundred years.
But Wallace had another love besides books and that was television. He had an addiction to it. He himself did not own a TV for what it did to him. When he was with one, he would binge (this was before streaming existed). And in this addiction he learned much about the world of entertainment.
“Entertainment lies on the addictive continuum. And we’re saved right now, because it’s just not all that good. But if you notice that like I’ll watch five or six, I’ll zone out in front of the TV for five or six hours, and then I feel depressed and empty. And I wonder why. Whereas if I eat candy for five or six hours, and then I feel sick, I know why.”
When asked about competition, Reed Hastings, the former CEO and co-founder of Netflix once stated:
“You get a show or a movie you’re really dying to watch, and you end up staying up late at night, so we actually compete with sleep.”
Entertainment companies today understand how to keep you hooked, to entertain with material that will keep us watching. But today, it’s not just the TV that distracts with entertainment, it is everything around us. Not only do our phones have TV on them, they have our friends, games, and email. The list is nearly endless with what our phones can do. In addition to this, entertainment companies hire psychologists to help create actions that will hook us to their services more, creating loops to bring us back and retain us longer.
Pleasure and desire are slippery slopes, it is a hedonistic treadmill where once you get some, you will always require more.
Epictetus warned his students about getting sucked into these desires by advising them to review the impressions they were presented with:
“Whenever the impression of some pleasure comes into your mind, guard yourself against being carried away by it, just as you should do with impressions in general. Let the thing wait a bit, and give yourself a pause. Then think of both times - first the one when you will enjoy the pleasure, and then the one after that when you will be sorry and be angry with yourself. Now contrast them with your joy and self-satisfaction if you abstain.”
The author, Simon Winchester, recently made the argument on the Michael Shermer Show, that what separates us from the great thinkers of ancient times and the enlightenment period is the fact that we are so consumed with distractions, we do not provide ourselves time to think, and when we do, we are so easily distracted.
This is not to say that TV is evil and we must avoid it. Rather, it is to take into consideration the goal of entertainment. Or, to use the analogy Plato used so long ago, to recognize the puppeteers casting shadows on the wall before us. The world around us has become one driven by entertainment and that means focusing more on keeping you pleased with pleasure than anything else.
The journalist and author Chris Hedges has made the argument that we are passed the age of intellectualism as a society because we have bought into the notion and love of an entertainment or celebrity culture:
“Intellectual or philosophical ideas require too much effort and work to absorb. Classical theater, newspapers, and books are pushed to the margins of cultural life, remnants of a bygone literate age. They are dismissed as inaccessible and elitist unless they provide… effortless entertainment. The popularization of culture often ends in its total degradation.”
We fight this by leaning into wisdom and knowledge versus just entertainment. And this does not mean avoiding TV or our phones, but having a better understanding of what to put our attention to.
It was the philosopher Albert Camus who once wrote that it was art’s purpose to bridge the gap between the suffering of the world and the artist, a way for the artist to remind his fellow citizens that they were not alone, that others too experienced the emotions, events, and struggles that they face. Art was, at one point, for more than just pure entertainment.
As Wallace articulated, there is a deep desire within us to grow knowledge and wisdom. We feel empty when we completely zone out and focus solely on entertainment. We must therefore pay attention to what we are putting our focus on. If we decide to be entertained, great, but we must be sure to track entertainment’s grip on us because once it takes hold, it never wants to let go.
As Epictetus advised, watch for the impression. See how it is stirring things within you. See how it drives your desire for pleasure and comfort. And then see if you can abstain from it for a while. The goal is to retain your control over your attention. Once you lose that, you are controlled.
Thank you again for reading and I hope you found this useful. Please feel free to heart, comment, or ask questions about this post. Suggestions are always appreciated and considered.
Until next week,
D.A. DiGerolamo
Well done 👍