Entertainment—Part 1 of 4

In my March 18th Daily Freedom, “Freedom, Not Vice,” I wrote: “The freedom that most libertarians, Objectivists, and other so-called advocates for individual liberty are promoting seems to be freedom to waste one’s life in the pursuit of hedonistic pleasure, to engage in any kind sexual activity one chooses no matter how self-destructive it is, to destroy one’s mind with any kind of drugs or mindless entertainment that will fill their meaningless lives.”

I want to discuss what I mean by these words, “to destroy one’s mind with any kind of drugs or mindless entertainment that will fill their meaningless lives,” with emphasis on “mindless entertainment.”

[I do not intend to do a treatise on recreation and entertainment, but only address some issues about these things that pertain to the life and freedom of an independent individualist. To keep them short there will be four parts.]

Entertainment and Recreation

Pleasure is the reward for right choices and actions. One of the rewards of productive effort is having the wealth that enables one to have leisure time to simply enjoy one’s life and the good things wealth is able to provide. Most productive people enjoy their work, even when that work requires almost super- human effort and endurance, and the achievements and accomplishments of their work are enjoyed as rewards in themselves. The human consciousness requires a variety of experiences to remain healthy, however, and no matter how satisfying one’s work is, for most individuals, no one kind of work will satisfy all their interests and desires. A deprivation of variety in one’s conscious experience is psychologically unhealthy and can lead to real psychological stress and pain.

[Ayn Rand addressed the issue of sensory deprivation as an illustration of the broader concept of the necessity for variety in all out experience, especially our conceptual experience, in a lecture given at The Ford Hall Forum, in Boston, on April 10, 1966. That lecture was also published in two parts in the April and May 1966, The Objectivist, entitled, “Our Cultural Value- Deprivation.” The original lecture was recorded, and you can listen to that lecture at the Ayn Rand institute, here, “Our Cultural Value-Deprivation.”]

There are some individuals whose life’s occupation is so rich and fulfilling they have little interest in or time for other things. Such individuals are rare, like Thomas Edison, but they have fully satisfying lives. For most of us, there is a need and desire for more conscious experience than we will find in our occupations alone, and it is those additional experiences we seek in our recreation and entertainment.

What particular recreation or entertainment will provide the kind of experience appropriate to the needs and desires of any individual will be determined, just as one’s appropriate occupation is determined, by each individual,s interests, abilities, and knowledge. An appropriate recreation or entertainment will be an enhancement of one’s life which makes it more enjoyable, leaving one with more enthusiasm for life, and more strength and ability to live it to its fullest. Any activity or experience that diminishes ones ability to live and enjoy life to its fullest is an inappropriate one.

Recreation and entertainment are pleasures, and it is as pleasures that what ought to be life-enhancing can become just the opposite.