Photo by Annia316

I was a late bloomer. There’s some self-praise embedded in that statement, because it implies that I bloomed, a point that could be disputed. So we’ll just say that to the extent I bloomed, it happened late. Specifically: I didn’t start dating until my late teen years, and it was also then I finally stopped growing and discovered my admittedly limited athletic abilities. Maybe most important, it was when I was around 17 when I rather suddenly gained some self-confidence and awareness of who I was.

That’s enough self-disclosure for now, in fact for the next year or so; now I’ll turn to late bloomers more generally. We regard late bloomers as somewhat odd, they are not typically the popular kids in high school, they seem a little lost, often they are rather nerdy. In fact, to say that someone is a late bloomer is usually a nice way of saying they are sort of a loser.

But here’s a counter-intuitive spin on late bloomers: Rather than being slow to mature, maybe in fact they are actually ahead of their peers. Maybe they don’t fit in because it takes several years for their peers to catch up to them. Because if you think about it, the sorts of things that late bloomers don’t fit into are not exactly mature and adult behavior: an overwhelming concern with how you are seen by your peers, conformity to prevailing social norms, participation in fads, precocious sexuality, fanatic competition for position in the social hierarchy.

I don’t really mean to suggest that early or middle bloomers are immature, that’s a generalization that is surely unwarranted. But I’m interested in the fact that people kind of look down on late bloomers, which suggests that our cultural standards in fact encourage those behaviors I just mentioned in the previous paragraph, because when somebody doesn’t act this way he or she is considered a weirdo.

Now we’re back to something that I have often pointed out in this blog, the fact that our values are not always what we claim they are. Our society (and probably other societies as well) has a set of shadow values—behaviors that we officially we claim to deplore, but actually we do much to promote.

So why should our society encourage teen-agers to be highly conformist, obsessed with popularity and the latest fads, and to flaunt their developing sexuality? The reason is that these behaviors are in fact highly compatible with a culture based in entertainment and consumption, as ours is. Children who are very concerned with displaying how they are in touch with the latest trends are fabulous and dependable consumers, and their concerns drive the larger economy of trendiness. And children who are highly oriented to physical arousal are going to pursue it where they can find it, in drugs, entertainment and sex. The fact is that our social and economic system encourages a number of values and behaviors we claim to deplore. Our mild disdain for “late bloomers” is just one more example of this.

Photo by Jamie Campbell

One of the most important reasons that we love entertainment such as dramatic movies and sports events is that they are suspenseful. If one football team leads another by 63 points in the third quarter, most spectators will lose interest in the contest, because there is no suspense about the outcome. Likewise, a dramatic movie has to make us wonder about the fate of the hero; without such suspense we will experience the movie as flat and boring.

This leads to an obvious question that, strangely enough, is rarely asked: Why the heck should we find such pleasure in not knowing how things are going to turn out? Generally speaking, don’t we prefer security and understanding to insecurity and uncertainty? Why do we so enjoy putting ourselves in situations in which we feel anxiety about the outcome?

The first clue to the answer here is that we don’t really put ourselves in such situations, because the circumstances that produce suspense are always in some sense imaginary or fictional. We can feel suspense about the outcome of a game, even if we are playing in it ourselves, but we don’t say that we feel suspense about whether the boss is going to fire us in the meeting later this morning (Our feelings in this case are more likely to be anxiety and uncertainty). So it must be something about experiencing uncertainty in an imaginary situation that is the basis for the pleasure of suspense.

Some authors have concluded that since the situation in a fiction (like a movie or a book) or a game is imaginary, the emotions we feel themselves have an imaginary quality, and that is why we can enjoy what would otherwise be an unpleasant emotion, such as anxiety or uncertainty. The problem with this position, among other things, is that it is difficult to understand what an imaginary emotion is, and how it could be clearly distinguished from a real emotion.

There’s a simple solution to this problem: As any anxiety sufferer will tell you, it is completely possible to generate very real emotions just by thinking about certain situations, you don’t have to actually be in those situations. The limbic system, the part of the brain that produces the basic feeling of anxiety, reacts to thoughts that the more advanced parts of the brain can recognize as imaginary.

So this is at least part of the answer to our question. Suspense is real emotion that is provoked by a situation that we recognize as not real. Because we recognize that the situation is not real, we can allow ourselves to feel enough of the anxiety to feel stimulated, but then control that anxiety by reminding ourselves that the situation is imaginary.

But there is another part of the question—why should that be so much fun? I can’t say that I know the answer the answer to that one, but I have a guess: Conscious human beings can’t avoid at least occasionally confronting the fact that the future is uncertain and that in fact the current moment could be their last. We love stories and other situations that have happy endings because they provide a sense of relief. They give us hope that the uncertainty and anxiety we often feel may be simply temporary, and in the end everything will work out just fine.

Photo: Save vs. Death

Most of what we regard as entertaining is suspenseful. Turn on your television and you will see contests (which man will she choose? Who will lose the most weight?), sporting events, murder mysteries, all sorts of different ways of generating suspense. Even the news attempts to be suspenseful (“Coming up after the break…”)

A few academics have studied suspense, and one thing that they agree on—indeed it seems rather obvious—is that suspense is a form of uncertainty. We feel suspense because we aren’t sure how the story or the game will turn out, and we become very interested in finding out. But here is where the mysteries start to emerge. First, obviously we find suspense to be very appealing, but what is so appealing about uncertainty? In fact, in the abstract at least, uncertainty is anything but an inherently pleasant experience. Second mystery: if suspense is uncertainty , then why is it possible to enjoy seeing a movie or reading a book more than once? You already saw the movie, you know what is going to happen, but still you are sitting on the edge of your seat. How can this be?

These questions are tough enough on their own, but I’m going to raise the bar by adding a third mystery, one that is relevant not just to suspense but to the broader question of our response to fictions. Why do we have any emotional response to fictions at all? Why is it that we can care so much about the fate of a movie hero that we know perfectly well does not exist?

In  Caught in Play I argue that all these mysteries can be resolved if we follow those simulation theorists who assume that the human brain is specifically adapted to adopt the perspective of others as it assesses situations. We are social mammals with what could almost be called a super power, the capacity to see and even feel the world as others see and feel it.

This capacity probably evolved to facilitate cooperation. But once it is present, it becomes useful in many other ways. One of them is that the ability to adopt perspectives that we know are fictional is basic to the robust human imagination, And, again, our imaginations entail feelings as well as thoughts: We can not only imagine a scary dragon but be terrified of it.

That’s why we can care about a story we know to be fictional. It also explains how we can feel suspense even when we know how the story ends. Knowing the ending doesn’t interfere with our ability to place ourselves in the situation of the characters in a story, and once we do that we can suspend our knowledge of the ending in the same way as we suspend our knowledge that the situation is fictional. Our ability to enjoy suspenseful games and fictions is based on our easy ability to separate these from our knowledge of the world from our own perspective.

That goes a long way towards addressing the first and third questions above, but not the first; it still remains unclear why we should find uncertainty so enjoyable. I’ll have something to say about that in a future post.

We live in a culture of entertainment, a society in which being entertained is so highly valued that at times it seems that if something isn’t entertaining, it should be avoided or ignored. The demand for just about everything to conform to the standards of entertainment has, in the last few decades, extended to the person. You have to be entertaining, or you will be avoided or ignored.

Therefore a small industry has arisen to help you develop your personal brand. As you know, big corporations spend millions to develop brands with flashy logos that encourage consumers to view the corporation and its products as exciting, cool, edgy, etc. Well,, if products need brands, why not individuals? Inevitably, “branding coaches” have started popping up offering advice on topics such as “Here’s what it takes to be the CEO of Me, Inc.” Most of the advice comes down to this: figure out your strengths and then figure out how to market them, thereby creating a public relations image for yourself.

This approach is generally oriented toward career management, but there is also a much larger (and somewhat harder to spot) process of self-branding going on in contemporary society. People have always used consumer products such as their cars and clothing to advertise who they are, but in recent years that process has accelerated. These days many high end houses are built not only to display the owner’s wealth, but also to assert claims about who the owner is: “I am the master of a Tuscan villa”, or “I am royalty” (I see lots of houses these days with turrets, which I suppose might be useful if you need to defend your house in a siege, otherwise they are just a way of saying, “I own a castle”).

Or , to take a different sort of example, I don’t listen to much country music, but I get to hear it sometimes at the gym, and these days it seems to me that a lot of it is about the sort of people who listen to country music: “I’m proud to drive a tractor and salute the flag” etc. Back in the day country music was about things like cheating spouses and drowning your sorrows at the bar; now a popular theme seems to be “I’m the sort of person who listens to country music.”—more self advertising. My final example is one that is so obvious it almost doesn’t need to be mentioned: social media. What is Facebook other than a vast platform for creating brand you?

Why do people feel they have to shout so loud to establish who they are? My answer would be: This happens for the same reason that movies get louder and brighter and more violent each decade: there’s a competition going on for people’s attention, and the competition will be won by whatever is the most stimulating. And increasingly that holds for people as well: people who are able to put together an impressive and eye-catching brand will be more likely to get noticed, get hired, be popular, etc.

I do have one question, however: What’s the difference between marketing yourself and simply being yourself?

Photo provided on flickr by austinevan.

As those who have read this blog in the past know, I consider entertainment to be very important in our culture. It’s important because much of what people want to do comes down to being entertained—watching TV, movies, and sports, playing games, amusing themselves online, going out to eat, drink, and party, etc., etc. In that sense, although we are unlikely to put it in this way, entertainment seems to operate for many of us as the very purpose of life.

Entertainment is also important because our lust to be entertained infects many areas of life that aren’t in themselves entertaining—we want our food and our cars and our politicians and our classes and our friends to be entertaining, just for starters. The result is that certain kinds of products and activities—for example, an honest and competent, but ugly and boring politician—tend to disappear.

In a number of recent posts, I have been trying to point out another aspect of the importance of entertainment—entertainment can only flourish in a particular sort of cultural environment. Whether it’s a strange coincidence or not, the mass entertainments of the turn of the 20th century (motion pictures, followed by radio and TV) were accompanied by new ways of thinking about people and values. At this time there was a growing emphasis on the importance of people being amusing and being able to create a good first impression, and there emerged a new flexibility about moral values. Above all, this is the period when it began to be widely accepted that the possibilities of fulfillment and self-realization opened up life’s most important quests. And what better way to find fulfillment than in entertaining activities and the acquisition of the flood of consumer goods that was starting to appear around this time?

I don’t claim that entertainment caused all these things, but I do claim that they all emerged in our culture at roughly the same time—around the turn of the 20th century. As I pointed out last time, that’s also the time period in which an increasingly vocal protest started to emerge against this culture of entertainment, a protest that usually took the form of religious fundamentalism.

So, what’s the point? Is entertainment good or bad? The point has nothing to do with entertainment being good or bad. Sure, there are social problems that are associated with entertainment; here are a few possibilities that come immediately to mind: childhood obesity, addiction, political polarization, widespread boredom. I’ve discussed all of these in this space.

But there are lots of good things associated with entertainment as well: tolerance of diversity, effective communication, and–can’t forget this–it’s fun. In the end, the point isn’t to pass judgment on our culture of entertainment, it’s to better understand that culture. Because we are more likely to be able to control what we understand. And what we don’t understand is more likely to control us.

Psychotherapy is such an important part of our way of life that one can forget that it’s a recent innovation. You will never see a character in a Jane Austen or Charles Dickens novel heading off for therapy, because therapy didn’t exist before the very late 19th century. Why not?

Some psychologists will argue that psychotherapy (like, say, chemistry) could only get going after some key scientific discoveries, but this is at best only part of the story. Psychotherapy emerged because of some important moral shifts in the late 19th century, shifts that also had something to do with the emergence of contemporary consumer society, advertising, and entertainment. When I say moral shifts, I am referring to matters like how people think about themselves and what they value in life.

The historian T.J. Jackson Lears sums up these matters by saying that around this time people began to develop a “therapeutic ethos.” By this he means that—compared to earlier ages–at this time people began to be very concerned about their physical and mental health, their well-being. In earlier, more religious, periods, questions like “are you getting all you can out of life?” and “are you happy?” were considered less important than questions about your state of salvation and your obligations to others. In fact, the idea that one should be maximizing one’s enjoyment and potential would have been absurd most people of 17th century.

However, throughout the 19th century the idea started to take hold that individual happiness and satisfaction was not only important, but in some ways the very purpose of life. People began to resonate with the notion that what was meaningful was not doing what society or God demanded, but rather finding and realizing the potential of their own unique selves. And as this inner self became important, taking care of it through various kinds of therapies became more important as well.

Why did these changes happen around this time? A full answer to that question would probably require a book, but notice that this is the period in which mass production techniques and other innovations began to create today’s consumer economy. The new moral attitudes encouraged consumption, because they stressed the importance of the individual’s happiness and fulfillment. It is especially important that this period also saw the spectacular growth of advertising and entertainments such as motion pictures.

Historians have pointed out that one of the most effective promoters of consumption was a new kind of advertising started to appear in this period: instead of providing information about the product, the new ads told the potential buyer that the product could transform his or her life. Strange, isn’t it: In a way, the ads were offering the same promises as the new science of psychotherapy, the possibility of personal transformation and a new level of satisfaction and happiness.

In pointing out this relationship between entertainment, advertising, and psychotherapy, am I saying that psychotherapy is unscientific? Absolutely not: a century of research has led to enormous advances and refinements in therapeutic techniques. But it’s best to remember where you came from, and back in the nursery it was a little more obvious who psychotherapy’s siblings and cousins were.

Photo by Sharon Mollerus

I have done a few media interviews in connection with Caught in Play, and at times I have been pressed to offer a judgment on whether the entertainment that is prominent in our culture is a good or a bad thing. I resist making such judgments, in part because that’s not my job. As a social scientist, my task is to study entertainment, not to pass moral judgments. In addition, it seems to me that the category of entertainment is too broad to be judged good or bad. Entertainment is like the weather—sometimes good, sometimes bad. But nobody makes a global judgment of weather like “weather is bad.” I don’t think global judgments of entertainment make much sense either.

That doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to generalize about the effects of entertainment on our lives. For example, we should be aware that participating in any sort of entertainment is a form of discipline. It seems odd to say this—watching TV doesn’t seem like discipline at all. That’s because we usually use discipline to refer to rigorous training, and sitting in front of a television does not seem like training at all, much less rigorous training. But our word discipline is derived from disciple, which as you may know means “follower.” To participate in entertainment like novels or movies or TV, you have to follow what is going on. You must become a disciple, a follower of the entertainment.

Those who have followed a course of rigorous training—to master a profession or a sport or a skill such as carpentry, for example—will probably be able to describe the payoff of this sort of discipline. Rigorous training makes demands, and because of that the person who goes through it is changed, something is added to the self. The disciple follows the tradition, and whether the tradition is becoming a physician or a member of a religion, the disciple is transformed.

The discipline of entertainment is not rigorous, it is fun; that’s why it is entertainment. But that does not mean we do not follow it. Entertainment can take us to relaxation and to pleasurable experiences, and it too will transform those who engage in it. Virtually everyone (including me) enjoys some entertainment. But some disciples of entertainment—like some followers of religion—become fanatics. When talking about entertainment, we use a shortened version of the word: fan. There are always some dangers with fanaticism.

At the end of the day, what people want to do with their lives is none of my business, and not something I have anything to say about. But I do feel comfortable saying this: What you follow is a pretty good guide to where you will end up.

Photo by Dan Catchpole

You know what it’s like to have a crush on somebody, right? You can’t stop thinking about that somebody, you spend hours daydreaming about your future with them, your desire for that somebody is so overwhelming that it verges on the unbearable.

But have you thought about the fact that this is oddly similar to how you sometimes feel about certain desirable consumer products, from a guitar to an iPhone to a car? It’s like the somebody: you feel like your life will only be complete once you acquire the product, you long for it, you are certain that once you have it everything will finally fall into place.

Why should we have such similar fantasies about romantic partners and consumer goods? And I’ve got some more questions for you. So, let’s say that when you were in the 10th grade you developed a staggering crush on, I don’t know, Pat, and eventually you went out with Pat and learned that Pat was actually a boring asshole. You then gave up having crushes on people, right? Wrong! You have kept right on with the crush business, despite the fact that it has been demonstrated to you again and again that when you actually get the person or the product, it turns out to be a disappointment.

So , that’s my second question—can you name another area of life where we hang onto beliefs that are so thoroughly disconfirmed by our experience? Why is that we continue to believe that we’ve just got to have some person or some thing, when we should know perfectly well that it’s not going to change anything?

Third question: How come I know this about you? Psychologists sometimes study people’s fantasies, and the basic assumption is that a person’s fantasies will be related to their personality and biography. But I know nothing of your history or personality Here we have a fantasy that seems to be shared by nearly everybody in the society. What causes this?

You might think you know the answer to that one: This is just the way human beings are. Humans everywhere develop longings for what they don’t have: the grass is always greener over there, etc. Well, yes and no. Sure, all people develop desires for what they don’t have. On the other hand, these powerful longings that are never quite fulfilled may not be universal at all. Historians who have studied romantic crushes have typically concluded that they didn’t exist in earlier ages; after all, how much sense do crushes make in a society where any contact with the opposite sex has to be arranged by your parents? And most people haven’t had a lot of consumer goods to fantasize about.

This suggests that the odd behavior of crushes on people and stuff may be generated by our culture. And that would make some sense, because high consumption economies do not work if people are satisfied with what they have. For our economy to work, we always need to want what we don’t have. And, strangely enough, we do.

Photo by Jason Scragz

Historians and anthropologists who have studied boredom have often concluded that it is not a universal affliction, but is instead a problem that is largely confined to contemporary society.  Perhaps this seems counter-intuitive: I mean, what could be more boring than hunting and (especially) gathering, the ecological adaptation that has been the means of support throughout most of the time humans have been on the planet?  Every day you get up and look around your territory for stuff to eat, no TV, no internet, not even a book to read. We might expect that foraging groups would have an extensive vocabulary of boredom, but as far as I know that has never been reported in the anthropological literature.

In fact, it seems as though nobody in the English speaking world complained of boredom until the mid to late 18^th century.  Why might this be?  No one knows for sure, but it is probably relevant that this is roughly the same time that modern novels started to appear.  More broadly, the first stirrings of the contemporary culture of entertainment date from around this time, and as opportunities for entertainment proliferated, people began to compare their daily experience to the adventure and romance and glamour of the worlds they could experience through entertainment.

Today, we expect or at least hope for more or less continuous entertainment.  Teachers and campaigning politicians need to be entertaining if they expect an audience, we expect our food to be full of stimulating tastes, we carry music with us wherever we go—obviously, this is a list that could go on and on.  We live in a world where those who develop more entertaining options for anything are going to get rich, and as a result more and more of our experience is entertaining.  Except when it isn’t.  Think about it—the moments when you are bored are those when you are not being entertained. What do you do to address your boredom?  Try to find something entertaining, of course.

What I’m saying is this:  We live in a society that sets us up to be bored.  Everyone who has something entertaining or stimulating to sell has an interest in our being bored, and an enormous amount of resources go into making sure that if we try to step back from the world of entertainment, we will be.  In our society, the opposite of bored is entertained; and more to the point, if we aren’t entertained, we’re bored.

Photo by Lewis Minor

In a previous post I explained the basic principles of celebrity atheism: Sure, there are actual people who correspond in some sense to well-known celebrities such as Beyonce or Scarlett Johansson. However, what we encounter out here in the everyday world is usually not those actual people, rather we encounter highly scripted, airbrushed, and staged images that the actual people help to produce. The images are not the people; the images are, like the fictional characters in a film, symbols rather than physical beings.

Why does this matter? It matters in several ways, here’s one of them: Many Americans, whether or not they are explicit about the matter, consider celebrities to be role-models. They want to be like celebrities, or they want to actually be celebrities. Consider an article on Angelina Jolie that appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in earlier this summer. Based on polling data, the article asserts “women want to be with her and be her at the same time”

As we all know, this is hardly unusual: kids wear the jerseys of NBA players and practice their signature moves, fans adopt the clothing styles and favorite foods of the singers they idolize or choose their career paths based on their identification with celebrities. Sometimes critics suggest that certain celebrities are inappropriate role models because they take drugs, get arrested for battery, or whatever. But I’d like to suggest a more basic reason that celebrities aren’t good role models: they aren’t people.

Take the Angelina article I mentioned, written by Naomi Wolf. I’ve got nothing against Wolf (although some others do), she’s a smart writer with more readers than I can even dream of. But she’s a celebrity believer, or at least pretends to be one in order to get her writing published in Harper’s Weekly. She tells her readers that Jolie “for the first time in modern culture, brings together almost every aspect of female empowerment and liberation.”

Cool, way to go Angelina. Wolf goes on to tell us that Angelina has it all, she has Brad Pitt, first of all, but also she cares for “half a football team of children”, does good deeds, all the while looking like…Angelina Jolie. And in so doing she shows all women that they too can have it all.

I demur. Images can be made to look like they have it all, but people don’t. The person Angelina Jolie undoubtedly has disappointments, messes up, and doesn’t look like “Angelina Jolie” much of the time. But even more important than the fact that people don’t have it all is that people don’t need to have it all, and setting that up as a goal is a recipe for constant dissatisfaction. Be a celebrity atheist, give up on the conviction that celebrities prove there’s a perfect life out there, and focus instead on doing your best in an imperfect but also kind of remarkable world.