Entertaining ourselves to death

It's inevitable, right?

I’ve been reading a lot of history lately.

Which got me thinking — what would leave our great-great-great-great-great-grandparents completely baffled if they hopped in a time machine and visited us for a week?

Electricity? Airplanes? iPhones? All-you-can-eat buffets?

All good guesses, but no.

It would be the fact that we get to entertain ourselves to death.

Back then, their lives were spent doing back-breaking manual labor on the farm, or if they were “lucky”, on the factory floor. Fourteen hours a day. Six days a week.

Then they shuffled home where an endless list of chores awaited them. Milking the cows, building a new fence to keep the wolves out, hand washing their clothes, or churning some butter.

Leaving, at most, maybe an hour or two a day for some light entertainment. But their entertainment looked much different from ours.

Perhaps they’d read a book (if they knew how), or listen to the same story told for the thousandth time about how father used to walk six miles to school (uphill both ways) slogging through two feet of snow, or on rare occasions attend some sort of community event.

And I’m not talking about something truly entertaining like SXSW. Oh no.

In 1850’s America, this event would have been something like the Lincoln-Douglas debates where hundreds would gleefully gather to listen to a dry conversation between two politicians. For seven hours straight…

I’d prefer to be waterboarded rather than be forced to listen to seven minutes of a modern political debate.

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Fast forward to today.

Now we have an endless supply of entertainment a mere swipe or click away that has caused us to become mentally obese.

The average person spends seven hours a day staring at a screen being passively entertained. And that’s on average.

You and I both know people who break out in hives if they go more than five minutes without peeking at a screen.

Maybe you see them in the mirror every morning?

I didn’t know what to make of this.

Is it a sign of progress? Or decay? Or could it be both?

Obviously, we are blessed to have loads of free time for all this sweet, sweet entertainment. But I fear it could be slowly decaying us to the point where we spend all of our waking hours demanding to be entertained.

Think about it.

How long are you willing to give an activity that doesn’t provide some morsel of entertainment? One hour? Ten minutes? Five seconds?

There’s gotta be a better way, right?

Yes.

It all starts by becoming a creator instead of a mere consumer of entertainment.

I’ll be the first to admit that I love my fair share of mindless entertainment as much as the next fellow. But I had a profound realization about two years ago.

I was more entertained by creating rather than consuming.

I’ve never felt fulfilled after an entertaining Netflix binge fest. But I’ve never not felt fulfilled after an entertaining creation fest.

My preference is writing. But yours could be drawing, painting, composing, or even building one of those god awful IKEA furniture sets.

Entertainment is great.

But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that we can only be entertained by others.

It never ceases to amaze me that the ultimate form of entertainment is found in active creation mode, not passive consumption mode.

Entertainment has become synonymous with consumption. But what if we made entertainment mean creation instead?

So I challenge you to pick up a paintbrush, pencil, guitar, or even a hammer for you psychos out there. And start entertaining yourself.

It’s amazing that we have a good portion of our time reserved for entertainment.

So how will you choose to entertain yourself to death? By consuming? Or creating?

Your thoughts? Please leave a comment below.

Photo by Mollie Sivaram on Unsplash