Right now, I’m on my computer planning on blogging about an article that I just read about distraction. I haven’t opened it yet, but I really feel the need to open facebook just to see if anything interesting happened. I’d also really like to continue watching season six of Lost, because I still haven’t figured out if the plane crashed in the end or not? (If you decide to comment on this, DON’T TELL ME THE ANSWER!) My phone is still in my bag but I’d really like to take it out. You never know when someone important decides to text you.
As the name of the article says, it’s about distraction. This article by Damon Young was a little bit like a slap in the face. I do believe that everything he wrote pretty much sums up my ‘addiction’ to distraction. The fact that one can’t go without checking their mail (or facebook, phone etc) for more than a couple of hours probably has to do with the psychological explanation that people need distraction to relax and to take a break from their life. ‘Taking a break from life’. It sounds so cheesy and desperate but isn’t that what we all do? On facebook we try to distract ourselves by looking at pictures and wall posts just so that there’s something to gossip about the next day in school. We have trouble dealing with our own problems and hence we look for other people’s problems. At least we don’t have to solve them, right?
I watch so many movies. So many TV shows. One day a friend and I counted the TV shows that we’re watching and I came to an amount of seventeen (Of course not all of them weekly, but on a regular basis). I can’t stop myself from watching them, it’s like a power overwhelming me and even if I’d like to start my homework, it’s very rather hard to convince myself.
The same thing applies to movies. What are people looking for when they watch a romantic comedy in their free time? They’re looking for love- except they’re not really looking, since they’re on their couch in front of their TV or laptop. Someone that doesn’t have a special person in their life or just went through a break-up, searches for a little hope and decides to forget about their own loneliness and dives into the world of someone else. This concept sounds pathetic and probably is, but personally I love not to think about my life for a while, and I’m sure that’s why movies and TV shows are so successful.
This article relates well to Hunger by Knut Hamsun. The starving man in the story goes through the different stages of hungering. Reading the book you notice that a lot of the things the man’s doing are pointless just like watching a movie. One day he decides to scare a woman, one day he decides to fool a man and another day he wants to give a random stranger five kroner. Why? Maybe to distract himself from the fact that he’s o hungry that he’s vomiting on the streets. Distraction. The man hates his life; he despises it, but still tries to make himself happier by making up these tasks for himself, like following two sisters in the street. He needs this just as much as a person nowadays needs some distraction that might involve technology. The man would have died if he didn’t have his inside jokes.
Men need distraction to be great.
No comments:
Post a Comment