Reality, In All It's Glory

Pink Floyd – Welcome to the Machine

It’s boring, and it’s our fault.

Reality is the most uninteresting aspect of our existence. We continuously do everything we can escape it. Movies, books, games, drugs, vacations: all ways of removing ourselves from our normal, boring reality. Would we being trying to escape, mentally or physically, if it wasn’t boring?

The problem is that it’s inexcusably repetitive. Our experiences from day to day look unmistakably similar to the experiences we’ve already had. Sometimes the shape, color or weather changes, but at its core it’s the same experience. To make matters worse, you can actually observe others going through the same day to day monotony, adding to the growing intolerance of repetition.

So our response is to escape. But how? I know, let’s make a movie about a guy that runs around dressed up like a bat, hanging from ceilings and beating up that crazy clown from our childhoods that scarred us. Woah! Now that’s fun. Notwithstanding that incredibly clever name given to him, what’s so appealing about this guy? He never does the same thing the next day. He never does the same thing the next hour.

The effects are miraculous. You become entertained watching this individual, totally forgetting, even if just for a moment, that the trash needs to be emptied and you need to be at work the next day. You’ve been removed from your normal, dumb routine and put into the shoes of another who never has to worry about trash or toilet paper, because he is just that cool.

It doesn’t have to be supernatural to have this effect either. Even better is the entertainment that looks like normal life. Romance movies are a great example. Guy and girl meet in an interesting way in a totally normal place and go on to have an incredibly interesting tale of not doing the same thing over and over for many years.

Then it ends. At first, the side effects of entertainment are minimal. You talk about it the next day with others who have seen it, changing the conversation for the day. Then more time passes, and more and more entertainment comes out. Suddenly, the long term effect kicks in: people actually begin to believe that these things are reality. That life is like this for some people, that there are those out there who don’t have to perform the same tasks on a routine schedule.

Now that the concept of reality has been created in the image of your favorite director, you can’t be interested in reality. Reality is plain and routine. Nothing ever happens the way it does in the movies, so you go out and look for where it does happen like the movies. Except it doesn’t. Then you get upset. You think others are out there having exciting lives and you’re not.

Now you’re bored and unhappy because you’ve witnessed excitement, and it’s not part of your life. You need something to do to keep you occupied until you can find that excitement. So you watch a movie.