I am going to say that living vicariously through someone else or a fictional character deepens the divide between the have and the have nots.
Living vicariously through others.
If we choose to experience our pleasure or entertainment through watching someone else in a role, in a game, a race, etc, etc we can cheer them on and celebrate with them when good things happen. It’s a very exciting premise to be a part of their good times, advertures and drama.
However, when that character is killed off, that player starts to lose their age, driver no longer wins or any other number of problems with continuing success we do not have to be part of their downfall or failure. We can detach ourselves from this “person” that we have aligned ourselves with and move onto another.
On the flip side, if we take on an endeavour ourselves, building up to that positive result is hard work, scary and challenging to us. Worse yet, if it doesn’t go well we feel the pain and discomfort of it not going well.
Whether it’s a quest for knowledge, learning new skills, building, competing, playing, walking, etc, etc there are a million different activities that a person can participate in and they can all go well, or go badly.
When success is achieved it’s much more powerful for us than being a viewer into that success and if failure does occur, while painful, we get the full learning experience from that failure.
Sadly, I think the situation gets worse with time.
The longer we go on living through fictional characters, celebrities, sports figures and the like, the more likely we are to lose our physical and mental edge that would help us maintain confidence in the face of challenge when taking on experiences ourselves. Our comfort zone reduces and things that should not freighten us do resulting in an experience tainted with negativety because our expectations for the experience were not based on reality, but rather someone’s reality.
By living vicariously through others too much, we become less of a participant and more of a viewer until the day we die when we can only say that our life was spent in employment to pay for the privledge of watching others participate in life.
I would continue to say that while much of our society would argue that financial wealth is the greatest achievement to strive for I think the “have nots” are actually missing out more on life experiences than on wealth. It has become a social norm to entertain oneself primarily through viewing others engaged in something. Whether it’s real people or characters in a show, movie or video game it’s extremely common to have this lifestyle of viewing as where the most time is spent.
I don’t understand.
I quest for knowledge, experiment, experience and expression so much so that I really don’t know what is going on in pop culture. I don’t know what’s “good” on TV these days or which movies are doing well at the box office and I don’t bing watch on Netflix. The result is I am unable to participate in conversations around the “water cooler” but that doesn’t make me sad.
What makes me sad is that it seems to be harder to find people who can talk about science, making, building, the arts, society, history, etc, etc.
What kind of world will my children find themselves participating in as adults? Will anyone talk about real life or will that be saved for a small portion of society running the system that we are contained within?
Thanks for reading.
Note: Comments are now completely open without requiring an account. If you want to comment on this post please do.