I often lament how harmful television is, how banal sports programs are, the detrimental effects brought on by video games, and the absence of intellectual stimulation in people’s lives. Then, last night, while feeling well under the weather and unable to muster the wherewithal to do much of anything at all, I turned to streaming nonsense to find something, anything that I could consume with the mindless abandon I claim to despise. I ended up on Sanford and Son, a TV show I watched regularly as a pre-teen.

That show was a turd of stupidity, playing with stereotypes repugnantly aimed at white people such as myself and the adults around me who were not discriminating in any meaningful way. I only point this out because I’m trying to scream at people that the current crop of broadcast and streaming content is as horrific and detrimental as those shows were to a population back in the 1970s.

So, while I want to convince others of this toxic relationship regarding their dependence on media, I realized that, like me, as an immobile child, they have nothing else. Their electronic window to the world when they get home is their hobby, their travels, their intellectual activities, and their purpose. Between work and the routine of relative nothingness, they decide to have babies, grow their boredom, lose interest in cooking, regress their reading skills through neglect, slip into acceptance of their descent into a marginal future, and ultimately find total resignation.

On the other hand, I am lucky to have a source of disposable cash that allows me to find options. Though I travel a lot and am able to afford computers, photography equipment, and other electronic equipment (as it pertains to making music), I have the intention to do things, and I’m unwilling to give in to the path of least resistance and watch TV or play video games. Regarding the claim of “disposable cash,” almost everyone else also has that, except they can’t realize it as they live paycheck to paycheck as that’s what they know and maintain.

You might want to suggest that this is not a choice, but I’d insist it is as long as we are a society that extolls the lie that it is a virtue to live beyond one’s means and that happiness is found in consumption, many are doomed to slog through life on the margin of humanity.

This brings me around to the mindless entertainment I mentioned at the beginning of this post; if those I berate with my arrogance of possibilities and living with intention were to buy into my idea, they might go home, toss the TV, cancel their Netflix account, never watch another Superbowl, and dump their game console, but what would they have then? For most, they’d find a void of utter nothingness. With unattainable lives defined by a social image popularized by influencers, ads, and videos, how should the mere mortal live a Kim Kardashian lifestyle (or whichever celebrity du jour is currently popular) if they can’t live it vicariously?

My lack of understanding or sympathy of the vacuum I’d open if I were effective in convincing someone to abandon the center of their universe would likely have profound negative consequences on the person who all of a sudden would be staring at four blank walls where boredom would howl into their being through alcohol or drugs as the only way to dull the terror of being nowhere with nothing to hang their identify upon. The nihilistic reality of those who won’t and can’t.