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The Modern Sisyphus

Why We Can't Enjoy Life Anymore, and How Television Made It So

By Louis NicholasPublished 6 years ago 8 min read
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Long gone are the days of the swagger man in his white tie and tails. Long gone is the time when man sipped his whiskey with a cigar holder in a pristine white jacket, whilst his lady sips a cocktail martini with her velvet gloves. The swing has died, the mood has changed. There simply isn’t time anymore. Or is there?

So what’s changed? Well, for one, the idea of leisure has corroded into crass television. Could anyone watching Blue Planet now possibly imagine a time without colour-television-techno-colour? Well, of course, logically it must have! And not for any technical reasons, no, the Americans invented it long before that. Towards this brave new medium, the Great British Public were simply aghast.

It’s crass! They say. It’s ghastly!

And yes, it was.

With what horror and dismay did the English stomach early American cartoons with all its loud and stomach turning vulgarities, followed immediately with a nice mouthful of eye-waveringly terrible advertisements. There was simply nothing redeeming about it. Filled with either overexcited salesmen in strange Americans suits or gaudy cowboys, the very thought of such things invading our living rooms were simply appalling. By Jove Heavens forbid! No! No! No! They said in unison to the BBC when Attenborough was trying to film in full colour, that would simply never do! But of course it did.

Colour television invaded the lives of your average pipe-smoking, bowler hat wearing Englishman like a storm. It came in the form of the television’s first and greatest magnum opusCivilisation. A personal view as so it went. Clark’s Civilisation proved at last that television could indeed be civilised and was indeed possibly civilising. As Blue Planet now is aimed at recording nature in its prettiest and most magnificent, Clark’s, almost half a century ago, (and the idea came from Attenborough himself) showed the achievements of man in exactly the same way. Television became a medium in which knowledge and civilisation became much more accessible to your every Joe, and thus part of the lineage stretching from oral dictation, writing, to now, recorded dictation. Read Clark’s book which came with the thirteen-part programme, and you would find what he was doing was just reading out his essay. In essence, that was just what a documentary was supposed to be, a book that came to life. As to quote in Clark’s words as he wandered around brutalist universities, this generation (now all in their sixties and seventies), was far better informed, far more well-read, far more rounded, and far sharper than the ancient thinkers that they were forced to study. And so they were and still are. Think of the starving monk in his hair shirt who has to copy Greco-Roman texts again and again in a cold stone cell, or the poor student back in the day who must actually go through two Folio volumes of Johnson’s dictionary just to find the definition of the word dull and be greeted by Johnson’s wonderful example of the word’s usage—"to write dictionaries is dull work." But down the line now to 2017, what has all this convenience brought us intellectually? Even Clark himself said, "facing our situation, one cannot be exactly joyful." Yet the question still remains, with all that technology has given us, where is our Raphael? Where is our Voltaire? Where is our Victor Hugo or Handel?

Like everything in life, we grow too accustomed to things. Just as in the same way the invention of paint tubes destroyed a painters’s motive in honing his skills and techniques, so too does the invention of the internet and television. However, I must confess, I am being unfair. It’s no use deceiving ourselves when we know too perfectly well that television was never invented for the purpose of education but for the sole purpose of entertainment (arguably, the money that can be made through entertaining, but I’ll keep this essay social friendly). Television must make whatever would sell. Ratings! Ratings! Ratings! As long as it brings what the people want, they would tune in, the ratings would be healthy, companies pay for advertisements, and everyone is happy. Except the formula doesn’t work. Coupled by the rise of internet sites like YouTube, as well as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Google, televisions simply does not have their monopoly on crass bitesize information, which previously it served as the greatest source of. And in retaliation of such, television sank lower even than it had done so before. Reality shows served as a golden formula in that it provided dumb thrill through bitching and intrigue. In David Mitchell’s words, it flattered those that are relatively smart when they compared themselves to the buffoons on the shows and gave the buffoons in the audience something to identify with. Of course, the actually intelligent people would never lower themselves to watch such absurdities, but that’s less than 5 percent of the audience, so who cares! I, personally, must confess that I’ve seen the first few seasons of Trump’s Apprentice, and it was the increasing rate at which the show deteriorated from being something mildly ghastly to something catastrophically brain-damaging which woke me up to the fact that this was a terrible show and so is most of television. And to these failing standards, there is nothing else to blame but the primal nature of the system itself. There is democracy, and then there’s mob rule. This sits firmly in the latter. By creating something, which, like a drug, abuses our primal instinct towards absent mindedness and vulgarity, television rakes in a decent popularity in the same way Trump became popular. This happening again and again ensures that at each turn, our brains are further and further lowered and debilitated each time a new show targets the audience. And in the same manner as every accelerating graph, the effect grows much more severe and at some point, reaches the state of free fall—Love Island was a perfect example of such. Watch any documentary and you’ll see the myriad of shots of white traffic lines and changing shots. Can we really not bear to look at someone from the same angle for more than five seconds at a time? Well, television should know. After all, in a capitalist system, it must be the best of all possible directors who would end up with the lucrative position of directing a documentary for us! But here we must face the rub. Capitalism, in other words, financial Darwinism, does not produce the best of directors at the send by getting rid of the bad ones; just as the survivor in nature is not always (practically never is) the best and nicest beast. Put a wolf next to a herd of sheep and the survivor would be the worst of the lot. The same goes with television and society in general. What helps us survive may mot help us thrive, and politics ought to show it. Indeed, people are shocked whenever ghastly things like Brexit and Trump happen under a democratic system, and I say, no wonder. Look at the television they watch!

Television has made us intolerant, thoughtless, crude, and drawn to cheap shocks. In the words of old Coward (the Justin Bieber of the 20s), "Why is cheap music so potent?" It’s a shame, and it’s horrible to say it, but a vast population of the human race never quite got to the maturing stage when they become less susceptible to the inciting pleasure of being candy-baited. Of course, I can’t be a hypocrite, and many would say that I’m being intentionally provocative in a populist attempt to get viewers and readers through notoriety. And maybe you’re right to say that, yet my arguments still stand. The sudden focus of Art after the War Years into the "Shock" and the "New" really foreshadowed what was to come. Being constantly unrestful, we crave change at every turn. We crave these quick primate impulse of fight and fright so as to distract us from the most constant and much more menacing questions in life—what is it all about? Why am I here? These sort of deep philosophical thoughts, which creep into our heads whenever given the time, is kept at bay by quick, colourful sparks, which the television gives us. Thus fundamentally altering our perception and ability to think like beings with brains and instead relying on impulses. And worst of all, not only has this changed the way we kill our spare time, it has profoundly ruined our ability to enjoy ourselves.

This brings me back to my original statement. Civilised fun? Ain’t nobody got time for that! Our current times no longer allow for the leisurely pleasure of dinner parties where conversation is King (and sex is Queen). Clubbing is a great example of this. We seem only to be able to enjoy ourselves in darkened environments where we can barely see or hear ourselves (let alone the dirt on the wall and floor), and where we are constantly flashed by bright fluorescent lights which blind us and hypnotise us into having fun. People wonder why drugs have been becoming an increasing issue. Well, here is your reason. Just as pornography has destroyed our ability to enjoy love in pleasure, the whole business of television and mass consumerism have corrupted our ability to enjoy ourselves without being intoxicated. And this in turned, fuelled by global finances with their quick and instantaneous digit switching, creates a toxic obsession with speed and quick rewards. Is there anyway out of this rabbit hole, you ask (if you’re still reading)? Well, you could always live in the countryside far away from civilisation, but if you like me find more rhetoric in life than courage, that nice bottle of Glenfiddich down at the local wine shop seems to help.

humanity
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