This to me is how our lives increasingly look. Lives focused on recreation, on ‘having a good time’. Trips,…
This to me is how our lives increasingly look. Lives focused on recreation, on ‘having a good time’. Trips, concerts, restaurant meals, sights etc. Like an eternal episode of The Love Boat. Lives of bullshit jobs, made tolerable by the monetisation of ‘fun’ outside those jobs. /1 https://t.co/4zoSDJWosM
Just one more market. As social media increasingly replaces all of our social and cultural life with these curated feeds of fun times, driving imitative rivalry, a constant pressure to portray the best episode of Love Boat ever, featuring yourself. /2
No real sense of the existential passions and challenges of life, the pleasure of taking on life’s problems and understanding and sometimes solving them, no sense of mystery. No link between the life of your bullshit job, and your fun times. /3
No sense that your daily work could align both fun and tackling societies’ greatest challenges, that the greatest fun in the world may be to work hard, like great artists and scientists do, the passion of understanding and easing the suffering of others. /4
Just marketed packages of fun, more revenue, as if the greatest happiness or even joy in life is to escape it. Don’t be a killjoy, have fun! Fun is compulsory, and a rivalry. Ever more extreme sports and experiences, always new territories to trample to death, as tourists. /5
No sense of the pleasure of just being. In the most ordinary ways, doing the most ordinary tasks. That can’t be allowed, because it can’t be monetised or made into a rivalry. Continuous adolescent boredom, always looking for ‘something to do’. /6
If we allowed ourselves to stop, even for a moment, on this perpetual treadmill of fun, we might have to confront the actual realities we’re living. We might have to just be. The P-plates for adult life should be the capacity to sit and do nothing for several hours. /7
To go nowhere, to cook your own meal, to not always be hungry for stimulation and new experiences and sights. To understand rather than experience. We’re on a well-worn track here, of endless distraction. Leading to social collapse and catastrophe. /8
An Australian writer I once greatly enjoyed and respected lost me completely when announcing they’d decamped to Paris for the summer, to write. Hungry for more experiences, and to be able to say ‘I’m in Paris’, on the dreary treadmill of imitative rivalry. /9
Couldn’t just be. Had to consume somebody else’s home as an experience. The Love Boat still chugging along. Most Western culture is the arse-end of empires, bored aristocrats looking for stimulation. Not ‘to be, or not to be’. But ‘to be, or go on a cruise’. /end