Wednesday 8 September 2004

Pic of the day: Spot the culprit in the corner... On the other hand, the good thing that can be said about TV is that without it we would probably not have anime, and how then would I illustrate my entries? (Screenshot from the anime DearS.)

Unhappiness and TV

I know I have written about this before, but I want to point it out before I move on to other factors. I believe that television is one of the most powerful forces that create unhappiness in our society. Perhaps the worst, perhaps the second-worst. Certainly the one most easily overlooked.

It is natural for humans to compare themselves to their neighbors, the members of their tribe. It may even be instinctive. But when TV becomes part of your life, the people you see there become part of your neighborhood, part of your tribe. You know that they are not really nearby, and in many cases are not even real. But the parts of the brain that regulate mood are much simpler and more basic; they are parts we share with dogs and sheep. The brain reacts to what it sees, to the experience that we allow to be planted in our brain. Without this illusion TV would lose much of its appeal: It is not emotionally engaging because it is informative, but because it is immediate.

On the television, you don't mostly see people like yourself. There are disproportionately many beautiful people, rich people, popular people, powerful people. In fact, there are even too many tall people. The net effect of all this is that people are constantly compare themselves and their loved ones to these TV neighbors. The outcome is not hard to guess. People grow dissatisfied with themselves, with their life partner, and with their standard of living.

This is not only logical, it also seems to work in practice. I am not just talking about myself here, although I think it is safe to say that I am a lot less unhappy than you would expect from my circumstances. But I have also known many people who didn't have TV, and they were also generally happy. Of course, they have other things in common as well; most notably they were Christians. But I think I have observed enough to say that being a Christian is not enough to be happy, unless you change your life as well. Forgiveness is good, but you don't want to be forgiven for being unhappy. You want to be happy or at least satisfied with your life.

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I will also treat a related topic here. In our society TV is the most important carrier of emotional advertising. Again, my apologies for bringing this up again, but it is too important to let it slide.

There are basically two modes of advertising: Information and emotion. There is no clear-cut line between them: With some products, just knowing that they exist may be enough to make people want them. But often this is plainly not enough, because the advertisers have to put the product in appealing circumstances. Of course we can see through that, we are not idiots after all. But it doesn't help as much as we might believe, because once again the advertisers are talking to our animal brain rather than our mind. The truth is that we do not make all our decisions consciously. If we did that, we would surely be Enlightened, like the Buddha when he arose from under his tree.

So what happens when we watch advertising, particularly in the movies and on television, is that we are programmed with certain desires and expectations. Later, when we drink soda or chew gum or wash our hair with shampoo and nothing wonderful happens, we are frustrated and disappointed. All this happens most of the time below the surface of conscious thought. The discontinuity between thought and emotion is particularly strong in young people, but to some degree it continues through our lives. Meditation and introspection can help with this, but I dare say that the cheapest and easiest solution is to not expose ourselves to an emotional manipulation in the first place.

"The proof of the pudding is in the eating". If in doubt, why not seek out someone who has chosen not to watch television, and see what effect it has had on their lives?