Photo by Mark Sebastian

Our society’s fascination with stimulating experiences of entertainment—3D movie spectaculars, glamorous celebrities, fat-and-sugar enhanced food, etc.—has a few downsides. One of them is that experiences that aren’t entertaining no longer seem very compelling. If you are used to highly processed foods with a lot of fat and salt, simple whole grains are likely to taste like cardboard. And when a product or experience is not compelling to people, less of it is produced, which is likely to mean that it costs more. Continuing with the food example, today feeding a family with fresh, non-processed foods is likely to be more expensive (in money and time) than picking up pizza and other fast food.

This is what I call “the logic of entertainment,” although I could also borrow a phrase from Charles Darwin: As he spoke of the “survival of the fittest,” today we could speak of the “survival of the most entertaining.” Whichever phrase one uses, the point is the same: when someone figures out how to make a product or a process entertaining, it’s a pretty good bet that over the long run the entertaining form of the product or process will survive and the less entertaining forms will not.

In recent posts I have applied this idea to sports in contemporary society. Increasingly our society is investing its resources in sports as entertainment and withdrawing resources from participatory sports. Why? In part because participatory sports aren’t very entertaining. We have evidently decided, for example, that there isn’t much point in providing sports opportunities for kids who are never going to be stars.

The same argument can be applied in a number of different areas. Take for example intimate relationships. When people talk about the head over heels experience of “falling in love,” they are talking about finding entertainment in an intimate relationship. “Falling in love” means experiencing highly arousing emotions as you interact with and even think about your partner: longing, sexual desire, happiness, etc. etc. In fact, the experience of falling in love is suspiciously similar to the joy of becoming lost in a game or a story: you forget yourself in your fascination with the partner, time seems to be suspended, your interest in the world outside fades.

Historians and anthropologists tend to agree that people from other times and places have not placed the same value on romance—a form of entertainment—that we do today. As a matter of fact, in both Europe and America the idea that marriage should be based on “falling in love” is quite new, having found wide acceptance only in the 19th century. It’s probably not a coincidence that this was also the period in which romantic novels started to be widely read.

Thus today we can see how the logic of entertainment has come to dominate our thinking about intimate relationships, so much so that other ways of thinking about these relationships just don’t make sense to us. We expect our partner to provoke strong emotional responses like those described in novels. Other ways of evaluating intimate relationships—compatibility, friendship, financial considerations, etc. seem almost offensive. And of course, many relationships end because one “falls in love” with someone new, and that makes the relationship one shares with one’s spouse seem dull and boring by comparison. Entertainment in relationships can be a lot of fun, but the idea that it’s the most important aspect of a partnership is also the source of a lot of suffering.

Photo from flickr, username Lulu

I almost never see newly released movies, because I’m cheap (let’s wait for the DVD!) and hate battling crowds. But one of my daughters really wanted to see Avatar so I broke down and took her. By now I’m sure that it’s virtually impossible to say anything original about the movie but I’ve got a new angle: I want to talk about the audience.

As we searched for seats in the sold out theatre, both my daughter and I observed that an overwhelming proportion of the audience at the movie was of overwhelming proportions. That is, a lot of people were overweight, very overweight. And judging from the vats of popcorn they were lugging around, they were going to be more overweight by the end of the movie.

Let me be very clear: I am not disparaging these folks. Some may have medical problems that contribute to their condition, but whatever their reasons, I have no right or desire to be critical of others’ weight. From a social point of view, however, I have to say that the whole thing was a little weird. Avatar is a utopian eco-fantasy about a world of lithe and powerful humanoids, the Na’vi, living in perfect harmony with their environment. Hundreds of Na’vi appear in the movie, and not one appears to have a single gram of body fat.

So here we’ve got a bunch of humans sitting inside for three hours in a dark room, munching on fat-drenched snacks, enthralled by the physical exploits of courageous beings utterly in tune with their natural environment. That’s what’s weird: Presumably the audience values being out in nature, perfecting physical skills such as balance and quickness, and over-the-top fitness; if they didn’t they wouldn’t be spending good money to sit and watch these things. Why, then, are these values not manifesting themselves in the lives of many in the audience?

The truth is that we often prefer the imaginary experiences of fictions over the real ones of life. For one thing, the fiction is easier and safer; we can imagine ourselves in the most challenging and dangerous situations and face no real discomforts or dangers. But even more important is the fact that we are capable imagining situations that are more compelling and meaningful than life ever is. Even when things are going well, real life brings a mix of feelings and emotions, our happiness is never as pure as we can make it in our stories.

Could our love of fictions be our undoing? Could it be that we are drifting towards the situation depicted in another dystopian movie, Wall-E, in which humans have become so sedentary that they spend their days reclining in floating chairs and pursuing bovine amusements? My guess is probably not. I think instead it’s best to interpret the situation here as just gently humorous.

In a way, the Avatar audience provides a metaphor for all of us who enjoy entertainment. What we are most attracted to is not infrequently what we lack in real life. And it’s kind of poignant that we may not recognize, as we passively soak up our electronic dreams, that often we are thereby ensuring that what we are attracted to will remain out of reach.

Some schools today have “media literacy” programs that teach students to be thoughtful interpreters of what they see and read in the media. Such programs often focus on news and opinion reporting, but they should also include the topic of “entertainment literacy.” By this I mean that we need to be more aware of the ways in which entertainment conditions our thinking, values and behavior so that we can make conscious choices about how we use and react to entertainment.

This is especially important because entertainment (such as TV, movies, novels, sports events, and so on) aims to provide powerful emotional experiences. As we all know, our emotions can strongly influence our assumptions and actions in ways that remain at least partially outside of our awareness. Thus it is possible to be influenced by entertainment without really knowing that this is happening.

A good example of this is what I call “romantic realism.” These are images that are similar to the world we live in, but somehow better. Think, for example, of a TV ad for food: the beautiful food sizzles and bursts with flavorful color, it is surrounded by gorgeous people having great fun as they consume the food. It’s like life, but better. Romantic realism is sold directly to people (movies, for example) and is also used to promote products.

There is a cumulative effect of observing these romantically realistic images day in and day out: We begin to be convinced, on an emotional level, that there is a world like our world but a little bit better. We begin to wonder why our own lives are marred by imperfections. We are prone to fantasies that our lives could be transformed “if only” If only I could get a new cell phone, if only I could lose weight or get cosmetic surgery, if only I could get a date with Mary…

Another example: Entertainment is so enjoyable that it begins to transform other institutions to become more like entertainment. Consider, for example, what we call the “news.” The news is supposed to make us better informed citizens. But people also expect the news to be entertaining, and news programs that do not meet this standard will not survive. Thus, to take a single example, much of our news today is actually about celebrities and entertainment.

In general, entertainment promotes a range of values we might not consciously endorse, but which are nevertheless very important to us and our economy: fame and celebrity, self-indulgence, demand for stimulation (the lack of which is experienced as boredom). This does not in itself mean that entertainment is a bad thing. Rather I just think we would benefit, both as individuals and as a society, from a clearer understanding of how entertainment actually affects our emotions and our experience. Entertainment can be a lot of fun, but it may also contribute to a sense of dissatisfaction with real life.

Photo by Michael Tracey

Again and again, throughout human history, the following events have played out: Step One: A group of people faces a threat of some kind. Perhaps a powerful army is advancing toward its borders, or perhaps a severe economic crisis portends uncertainty and privation. Or perhaps it is just that the group is being left behind as others successfully pursue wealth and status.

Step Two: Despair begins to spread. Some respond with apathy, others with violence. Suicide rates may increase, along with rates of mental disorders such as depression and anxiety disorders. Hopelessness and apathy are rampant; many turn to heavy use of alcohol or other available drugs.

Step Three: A powerful leader arises, typically a person who has him or herself suffered as a result of the society’s troubles. Usually—although not always—the leader’s power stems from a claim to speak for God. The leader’s message is: Follow me, I know the way out of our dilemma. The leader specifies what people must do—engage in a holy war, perform certain rituals, give up alcohol, etc.—and promises that a realm of paradise awaits his or her disciples. But those who hear the message and reject it will be punished not only by exclusion from the coming paradise, but by death and damnation.

Possibly these steps sound familiar to you. They outline the basic structure of what scholars of religion call millenarian movements (so named for a Biblical prophecy that Christ will reign over the Kingdom of God for a thousand years). You may be able to name several of the religions that have started in this way and have changed the course of human history: Christianity, Islam, Mormonism. And of course, smaller movements of this sort continue to arise today, and sometimes become the focus of media attention, especially when their clashes with the larger society lead to violence (Jim Jones in Guyana, the Branch Davidians in Waco).

Starting around the turn of the 20th century, there was a frightening development in the long history of millenarianism: It began to take secular (non-religious) forms. Powerful leaders emerged in the chaos of Europe during and after the first world war who promised utopias based on the principles of their political systems—communism and the Thousand Year Reich. As we all know, the chain of events set in motion by these social movements led to unprecedented horrors.

Although there have been many millenarian movements in America, no such movement has ever taken the reigns of the government. However, it’s interesting to think about whether we have created—and are living in—our own distinctive, and relatively benign, form of millenarianism. At roughly the same time as the rise of millenarian-tinged totalitarianism in Europe, Americans began to develop extraordinarily effective techniques of advertising and entertainment. The new innovation that built these institutions was nothing other than the basic premise of millenarianism, promises of a world of enormous pleasure and satisfaction if you will just buy this product—whether it be a car or a movie or a soft drink.

Today our society is plagued by high rates of boredom and apathy, of depression and anxiety, and an intractable drug addiction problem. No wonder that people are happy to retreat into the utopian fantasies of the romance novel, the blockbuster movie, the dream of a new iPhone. It’s millenarianism lite: no eternal damnation, no death camps, all utopia all the time. Could be worse, I suppose.

By Sabrina Campagna

Sociologists studying love and marriage report a finding that you probably won’t find surprising: people don’t describe their marriages as the “happily ever after” bliss suggested in our romantic stories and movies.

Most people say that no matter how romantic the relationship felt when they were dating, marriage isn’t the achievement of perfection. Rather, marriage itself requires hard work, compromises, working on a friendship, etc. etc. And come to think of it, our romantic stories aren’t about long term relationships like marriages at all, they are about people in the early stages of getting to know one another. Think about the iconic romance, “Sleepless in Seattle” in which the couple doesn’t even meet until the movie’s final scene.

So why do so many people continue to hope for a blissfully romantic relationship even though they “know” it’s not a possibility? And this isn’t just a matter of day-dreaming. I’m sure you can think of people who broke up their families because they “fell in love” with someone else, only to have that new relationship eventually disappear (or else morph into a real marriage like the one they left in the first place).

One possible answer to the question of why people pursue perfect romance when they know it doesn’t exist has to do with the incredible popularity of our romantic stories. Last time I checked romance novels accounted for about half of all books sold in any given year. As I have pointed out before, we human beings are really adept at projecting ourselves into stories, so that as we become caught up in a story we actually think and feel from the fictional perspective. Our ability to do this is based in no small part on the imitative capacities that are built into our brains: we can even imitate imaginary situations and easily experience what it is like to see and feel the world from that situation. Maybe a story is not a real relationship, but for a few hours it can come close to feeling like it’s real.

So even if you recognize that eternal romantic passion isn’t really an earthly possibility, you can still experience it by getting caught up in romantic stories. This puts your mind in the interesting position of having a belief (happily ever after doesn’t really happen) that is contradicted by experience. This is probably why many of the same people who explicitly say that real relationships never work out this way continue to describe an ideal relationship as a happily ever after romance.

And that surely bears on the question I started out with. People continue to hope for and try to realize perfect romantic relationships in spite of the fact that they don’t see such relationships as possible. It kind of makes you respect the power of a story.

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 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.

Yesterday Duff McDuffee commented on one of my earlier posts and alerted me to his overlapping work criticizing the self-help industry. He and I (and many others) agree that it’s time to mount a robust campaign in opposition to the peddlers of extravagant promises of self-perfection. There’s much to comment on in his thought-provoking post, but I’ll try and control myself.

One thing McDuffee doesn’t cover (and this isn’t a criticism but rather a friendly addition) is the important role of entertainment culture in promoting the conviction that personal perfection is an actual possibility. In fact, I would go so far as to classify self help as a sub-category of what I have called (in Caught in Play) “romantic realism,” the splashy images of perfection that confront us at every turn. One of the most important examples of romantic realism is much advertising, in which we observe a world which looks a lot like our own world but is somehow better.

For example, we are familiar with the concept of friends gathering to eat at a restaurant, but a TV ad depicting such an event is likely to feature spectacular looking people eating spectacular looking food and having more fun than we mortals ever get to have. Of course, the idea is to plant the notion that you too would have a wonderful experience if you would gather a group of friends and head for the restaurant. But the overall effect of observing perhaps hundreds of such images every day is to cultivate the conviction that there really is a much more satisfying life out there if you could just go to the right restaurants, drive the right car, get the right stuff.

I classify romantic realism as a form of entertainment because it follows the same basic pattern as, say, a television drama: We are presented with a fantasy that is similar to everyday life, but with all the boredom edited out and everything that stimulates us (attractive people, suspense, violence, music…) turned way up. Once you start looking for it, romantic realism is everywhere. I just put up a post on romantically realistic people (we call them celebrities) at my blog on Psychology Today. Even our food has the volume turned up (salt, sugar, fat). As Ellen Goodman pointed out in an excellent opinion piece on this in the Boston Globe yesterday, two thirds of the population is now overweight. I wonder if that’s just a coincidence?

In this broader context, self help, the idea that if you purchase this book or DVD or whatever you can find your way to perfection, is just one more example of the point. And of course, all of the different domains of romantic realism reinforce one another, so that the notion that perfection is really a possibility becomes difficult to resist. I wonder if any population in the history of humankind has ever been as convinced that heaven is so close and attainable.

Waxy photo by DanieDVM

I know some things about your life, because I know some things about people in our society (including myself). I know that you (probably, there are always exceptions to generalizations) have a fantasy that things will be better for you when (1) you graduate (2) you get married (3) you get the promotion, or a better job (4) you pay off your student loans (4) you get a new laptop (5) Tom, the hunky guy, asks you out (6) etc.

Celebrities–the ones who have made it

If you are fortunate, as I am, you are healthy and have a family you love and an interesting job. But still things aren’t quite what they could be, are they? Real fulfillment is out there, but it’s just out of reach. You’re close, but not quite there. Things will be perfect when…

You know you are not quite there because you’ve seen real fulfillment. You see it in many places, but most strikingly in the lives of celebrities. Those are the folks who have finally made it, aren’t they? They can have whatever they want, they are surrounded by admirers, they can bask in the certainty that they are cool. But of course, sometimes they have addictions or relationship problems or sometimes they make fools of themselves, so it’s obvious that their lives are far from perfect.

Somehow, that doesn’t really matter, does it? It doesn’t matter because they did it, they made it to real fulfillment. Most of us aren’t quite sure of who we are or where we are going. But a celebrity knows where she is going because she’s there.

How do you ever know if you are all that you could be?

Of course, that’s not actually true, I’m sure that celebrities are miserable in at least the same proportion as the rest of the population. But at the same time I, and you (probably) can’t really shake the genuine conviction that celebrities have it made. Back to doublethink  again.

A simple test: If your fairy godmother appeared and offered to make you famous. can you honestly maintain you’d say “no thanks?” The reason you’d take her up on it is that you know that if you were famous you would have achieved what you, and all of us in this society, believe to be the very purpose of life: you would have fulfilled your destiny. Finally, that nagging feeling about being one step away from happiness would go away, because you would have taken that last step.

We’re supposed to be all that we can be, and famous people are the only ones who can be sure they did. And that’s why in all probability you can’t really put aside your feelings about celebrities, your secret fascination with Brad and Angelina. In your heart you know—not believe—that they have done what it is the bedrock purpose of our lives to do, they have attained our version of perfection. Celebrities offer us the most awe-inspiring of possibilities: to actually behold perfection here in this flawed world.

This post first appeared on my blog “Sex, Drugs, and Boredom” at Psychology Today.