Csikszentmihalyi, Baudrillard, and Why I Don’t Watch Television
I’m attempting to wean myself off of bullet-point stories. Everyone is doing them these days and they’re so easy to do - it seems like cheating to burst out of the strictures of the paragraph simply because of laziness or expediency. ALTHOUGH, bullet-point stories can approximate the experience of being told a story face to face, so I’m using them for all of my Tales of Romance.
I’m a contrarian. Everyone is reading Franzen, watching Mad Men and telling bullet-point stories, which repels me from those things. Not because I wouldn’t enjoy them - I’m almost certain I’d become hooked on Mad Men if I watched an episode or two. But that would plunge me into the collective unconscious, make me beholden to a set of ideas and experiences that other people are currently having, and force me to become topical. In short, it would estrange me from my own solitary life of the mind. When you all watch the same television show, you consider the same dilemmas, battle the same minute emotional quandaries and extrapolate the same transient truths - your mental lives begin to click together and you bind your cerebral growth to a flickering nothing.
Thanks but no fucking thanks.
I also avoid television because of Csikszentmihalyi (“Chick Sent Me High.”) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a Hungarian psychologist famous for his theories on creativity. Csikszentmihalyi coined the word “flow” to represent a creative state where an artist or athlete is completely consumed in their chosen activity, very resistant to distraction, and highly productive. Csikszentmihalyi himself described flow as ”being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.” I was initially resistent to the theory, if only because it seemed like so much New Age pseudoscience, but it survives academic scrutiny. In fact, his theory of flow is consistent with Yerkes-Dodson Law: ”performance increases with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a point. When levels of arousal become too high, performance decreases.” Flow is a state in which your talents and abilities are perfectly matched to the task at hand.
Csikszentmihalyi believes that the key to happiness is to be in a state of flow as much as possible, that you can train yourself to slip into flow more quickly, and that television can block you from optimal creativity for hours. I very rarely watch television, but I read what you write after you’ve watched television. The price of consumption without consideration is staggering: you allow these people to rent your mind for thirty minutes and dump their concerns, frustrations and opinions into your mental groundwater. The price of mental freedom is eternal vigilance.
Do you think there will ever be a moment, 10 years from now, when you think to yourself “Thank Christ I watched all of those different iterations of the Real Housewives franchise! It was the key to my eventual success!” Yes, I know, it is imperative that 30 of you post gems like Snooki’s famous “Pilgrim from the 20’s” line at the very moment they happen. But which is funnier, a girl whose grasp on history borders on the accidental, or all of you who tune in to watch her each week?
Even great television can be bad for you. I watched 5 episodes of The West Wing this year, and then stopped. The writing was snappy, the characters endearing - it was great television - but I couldn’t imagine farming my brain out to this Pollyanna bullshit about the higher roles of government for that many seasons. This idea that government is people and any flaws in it come from the flaws in the people themselves exists in this extrauniversal bubble where all the bullshit we believe that isn’t true resides. These ideas are mimetic shackles.
The more you are seduced into the prevailing culture, the more of your own autonomy you sacrifice. The zeitgeist will never tell you anything that you don’t already know, it will insult your intelligence at every turn, and it will herd you toward a manufactured, synthetic reality. Because the symbology of the lie is so clear cut, you will feel nurtured and strengthened by it, and the door to your own objectivity will recede. And you will rejoice. The lie is warm and inviting, and cannot exist without you looking at it. What is beyond the lie? Fear and freedom, in equal measures.
To close, a bit from the wikipedia page for Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation which I have not read, but which Myles described to me a few months ago:
A specific analogy that Baudrillard uses is a fable derived from On Exactitude in Science by Jorge Luis Borges. In it, a great Empire created a map that was so detailed it was as large as the Empire itself. The actual map grew and decayed as the Empire itself conquered or lost territory. When the Empire crumbled, all that was left was the map. In Baudrillard’s rendition, it is the map that people live in, the simulation of reality, and it is reality that is crumbling away from disuse.
