Regarding this article
Oh this is precisely my kind of persnickety curmudgeon opinion piece.
Increasingly I find myself inconvenienced socially by people being so deeply ensconced with escaping reality and each other via media.
Increasingly I find myself drifted away from these things and falling deeper into the wellspring of the world as it gushes from the Now.
Several years ago I came to a simple conclusion: I have limited time to do this human thing. If I am to spend a moment of it doing something, that something had better be worthwhile. I got very pretentious and precious about it. At a point though, really a natural result of my own selfness, I watched/read/played too much and idk call it calibration or taste or what have you, I stopped being able to turn off the perception that some things are better in their technical execution than others. Ruinous.
I later somewhat recovered and I maintain that Sight while also not needing to care.
The current development is I find myself spending maybe 5hrs a week on media, including a movie night with friends(and we DO talk during) which is down from like…media consumption as a second fulltime job, basically.
Because engaging with people and projects is like…it’s like these are the places my neuroticism cannot undermine the value. The more I try to, the more I am deeply convinced the only place to find value is in relationship to others.
So let me out-curmudgeon this article writer. Yes, human movement is archived in television, and film is in search of elevation of story beyond what even stage plays could do, but neither of them is as good as stopping the voyeurism and engaging with community and even the stranger sitting next to you. What’s the point of a story if you don’t use it to reflect on the way you live? People live unexamined lives while ceaselessly examining the lives of others, even though the others don’t exist or for all pertinent purposes don’t affect their condition. Something about that marks me as really tragic in a deeply existential way.
All my homies hate the spectacle.