Technology is a brilliant advancement for humanity that creates massive opportunity, but also massive distraction. One of the most important breakthroughs of the 21st century is the smartphone, the portal to the lands of the internet. More powerful than the technology used to land on the moon.
The smartphone can be used for extensive learning, but you can also waste your life. Even if you could live for a few centuries, you still wouldn’t be able to play every game, watch every movie, or listen to every song.
Most of our technology in some way desires to entertain, and so we are entertaining ourselves to death.
Entertainment exists off the path. Although the path can be entertaining.
While entertaining yourself, you miss opportunities for growing, training, and improving: walking farther down your path to mastery.
Entertainment isn’t bad per say. However, entertainment will not give you a fulfilling life nor will it make difficult challenges go away, as many use entertainment to hide from their paths, and from themselves.
Entertainment is a Reward
Give yourself entertainment as a reward for progress down the path, towards a large goal and a bigger purpose.
People are unfulfilled because they don’t do anything meaningful, and all meaning has some degree of difficulty, of which the greatest meaning typically contains the greatest degree of difficulty. If the path your life is on only exists for entertainment, the world becomes cold, and your only pleasure comes from consumption of entertainment. You have no tolerance for hard things because the things you do are all passive.
Entertainment addiction can become so severe that people completely neglect their basic self-care habits like showering, brushing your teeth, or keeping your space clean. In Japan, about 500,000 people exist in this fashion, dubbed Hikikomori. This phenomenon does not just exist in Japan, but can be found worldwide. [1]
Hikiomori, and other unhealthy shut-ins, don’t have a path. They don’t have a path, so they don’t have a why, so they don’t have meaning. As sweet as entertainment is, it is pleasure, like candy, that does not create any fulfillment in the wanderer.
What to do about Entertainment addiction
Lean into mastery and find a path to follow that goes forward. Entertainment addicts are on a path shaped like a zero, a loop signifying their zero growth or development. Any path is better than no path, and being good at something will clear the way to be good at other things you want to be good at that you learn along the way.
Because the way is the same in all things.
Instead of giving yourself unlimited entertainment time, earn it. Give yourself one day a week for entertainment, like Sinful Saturday. All of the entertaining happens on Sinful Saturday, where we step off the past to rest and refresh, only to get back to the path on Sunday–the next day. That means no TV, Video Games, or other entertainment vices except for one day per week used purely as a way to refresh the warry wanderer.
You can also earn a luxury day. A day when you can do whatever you want to do that is non-destructive to the self and the path, earned for some kind of accomplishment. For example, if you get an A in a class you are studying hard for, that could be worth two luxury days to be redeemed at anytime. Guilt-free.
Entertainment doesn’t feel guilty when it is earned, because it isn’t. We must earn our right to entertainment by completely exhausting our Body, Mind, and spirit.
Setup difficult, achievable challenges.
These challenges that live along the path can have rewards assigned to them that make the objective more enticing. Whatever you can do philosophically to walk farther down the path should be added to the personal philosophy.
Entertainment Addiction
An accomplishment-filled life is a fulfilled life: Fulfillment through accomplishment.
If you get what you want without challenge–like entertainment–you take away the value of the reward, trapped in a pattern of consuming a reward without the fulfillment of the challenge. This fucks up your life.
Don’t let entertainment be your purpose. Find a path, and use entertainment as a reward for the diligent, purposeful exhaustion of your Body, Mind, Spirit.