Entertainment—Part 3 of 4

One virtues of entertainment is that it can be enjoyed with less effort than creative tasks can be, and the more passive the entertainment the less effort is required. The relaxing nature of such entertainment is one of the things we enjoy about it, as the means of having a pleasant experience with little effort. Relaxation is good, it allows one to recharge their mental and physical batteries, to recover the energy and motivation required for the continued pursuit of one’s life objectives.

The relaxation that is good does not include the relaxation of one’s standards and values, however. To allow oneself to be filled with ideas with which they do not agree is not energizing, it is self-defeating. To allow oneself to laugh at jokes that belittle one’s own values is self-demeaning. To allow oneself to have visual vicarious experiences they would loath as immoral in, “real life,” is self-destructive.

Human beings are creatures of habituation. Much human learning depends on this aspect of our nature, and without it we could not learn to use such things as language, could not learn to do such things as driving a car or typing. The ability to develop habituated behavior includes our thinking, and correspondingly, many of our feelings and desires. What we always intentionally think, and feel because of those thoughts, we are more likely to think and feel when we are least careful about what we are being conscious of.

In most cases human beings are not bound by their habits, but habits are by nature easier to conform to than to resist or defy, which is part of their usefulness. If we discover we have a habit that we consider self-harmful or self-destructive we can, by intention, not conform to the habit, but it will be with difficulty, and perhaps some unpleasantness, at least until new and better habits are developed. Resisting habituated behavior is only possible when one truly wants to change such behavior, and in some cases, the pain of changing such behavior overcomes the will to make that change.

To the extent one allows their thinking, and feeling, to be manipulated by passive entertainment, the thought patterns and desires can be habituated by those experiences. The extreme examples are those who become habituated (or addicted to) pornography, and develop patterns of thought which are acted out in sexual crimes or those who are strongly influenced by constant exposure to violent entertainment and end up acting out what they have experienced.

The extremes illustrate the power of entertainment to influence, especially the more passive forms of entertainment, like television and films. Everyone is different, and some people are able maintain their critical judgment while experiencing any passive entertainment, but they are rare individuals.

Most people are not even aware of the subtle influence and habituating nature of passive entertainment, and are often addicted, not only by the content of such entertainment, but to the entertainment itself. How many people become emotionally distraught when they are unable to see their favorite TV program?

Anti-life Entertainment

The purpose of entertainment is to provide life-enhancing enjoyment, but for many people, entertainment is not life-enhancing at all, but an escape from life, or a substitute for life, and in some cases a waste life.

Some supposed synonyms for entertainment are “distraction” and “diversion.“Both of these were exactly what the “entertainments” provided by the Roman government near the end of that civilization were, in to a very great extent it is what entertainment has become in most of Western civilization and especially in the United States.

The entertainment enjoyed by most today are not an enhancement to an already fulfilled and successful life, but a distraction from the daily drudgery of a life without real pleasure of meaning. Most people have no real purpose in life, no life goals or objectives beyond existence, and perhaps a fear of dying.

For many such people, entertainment is not a diversion from the drudgery of life, but a substitute for life. Having no real life of their own, they live vicariously through the experiences offered by their entertainment. It is their only real pleasure, but it is a pleasure like that of drugs, which both covers up the reality they dread, providing them the unearned pleasure of hedonism.

Like drug addicts, they can never get enough, an many become so consumed with the pursuit of their entertainments they waste all their resources, their very lives, on the pursuit.