The Escape of Entertainment
I’ve recently thought about why people (myself included) are so invested in entertainment. Entertainment, at a base level, includes television shows, movies, video games, and music. Just these four mediums of entertainment have become routine for humans in a day. Most would look at my question in a simple way, answering that “entertainment and media is just stimulus like anything else humans consume such as food and our senses”, I’m attempting instead to give perspective at why it’s artificially feeding our brain in an unnatural way and how we can navigate entertainment in a healthier way.
I know what you may be thinking if you’ve read any of my movie reviews on this website before, “Is Dylan about to harp on why entertainment is negative to humans? Isn’t his whole thing reviewing movies and watching them?” Yes, I’m about to harp on entertainment quite a bit even while I’m an avid binge-watcher.
For just a few seconds, think about everything you do during the day. Listening to music, watching the news, scrolling through apps on your phone, watching a movie, etc. Most likely one of these happens during your day. Now I’m going to assume you enjoy doing at least one of these things. Especially through the Tv screen or the phone screen, your brain is constantly processing the content displayed and attempting to understanding it. This process, combined with your emotions, creates an experience for your brain and what I like to call an escape. No matter where you are, your brain becomes fixated in the content from the Tv show, movie, video game or whatever it is. When your brain has become fully immersed and focused in the content, this allows the person to temporarily escape from their life. Thus, forgetting the personal baggage they carry from their day or week, positive or negative. Now let’s tie this to how this experience is inheritely unhealthy for our brain.
For the majority of time humans have lived there was no technology, let alone any type of comparison to what we have created recently to give even more of an escape. Humans created their own entertainment from the natural world in the past, not from a screen. The things our brain finds most interesting in movies or video games are things unachievable in your own life and your brain is temporarily experiencing a fantasy and not reality which, therefore is an escape. Whilst experiencing this fantasy, our brain is overloaded with Seratonin and other chemicals which helps drive the escape. Keeping along with the idea that this is an artifical and unnatural, our brain is then recieving euphoria without achieving it on its own. This is related to when frequent drug users can’t achieve their feeling of euphoria while on the drug, sober. When we go back to our boring daily lives after watching Rambo First Blood, we don’t get that same high and thrill as we did from the movie. What I’m getting at here is that movies, Tv shows, and music are replacing the way humans were designed to consume entertainment. We weren’t meant to sit in front of a screen and watch someone else experience cool shit… we were meant to be experiencing the cool shit!
Now don’t get me mixed up. I love movies, tv shows, and music just as much, if not more than the next guy. I’m not trying to convince you with this opinion piece on why you should give up movies and entertainment as a whole and go back to rolling rocks off a cliff like a caveman. I’m also not saying that entertainment as a whole is unhealthy. For one, I’m giving you a perspective you might not have entertained yet (no pun intended), being that humans are escaping their boring lives with media, and two, I’m sort of telling you to go back to rolling rocks off a cliff like a caveman. Humans have an innate need to go outside and experience the world, that’s why there’s Vitamin D. This could be traveling the world, playing sports, exercise, or literally just sitting outdoors. Once we decide to experience the world naturally and accquire that euphoria from doing the cool shit, instead of from drugs or television alone, we will be healthier beings.
