Everything Is (Not) Entertainment
How to avoid drowning in the bottomless soup of distraction
Everything Is (Not) Entertainment
A derivative epiphany
Back in one of my high school English classes, we were given an opportunity to choose our next book report format. I don’t remember the exact parameters, but I do remember my decision to read both 1984 and Brave New World, with the vague and unoriginal idea of determining which had been a more prescient allegory for the modern world.
For a bit of context, this was back in 2000 — before 9/11, before Facebook, before the iPhone. In other words, the world we live in today was still a long way off.
If you’re not familiar with those two seminal works by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, allow me to briefly summarize.
1984 presents the dystopian vision of a world divided into two eternally warring mega-nations, the populations of which are strictly policed and brainwashed by an all-powerful bureaucracy, a la the Soviet Union at the peak of its influence, or China right about now. After joining a resistance to fight the system, the main character is eventually tortured into cognitive submission, proving that in this world, there can be no hope of a revolution. The system wins. The end.
Brave New World, on the other hand, is about a society of decadent abundance. There are some “uncivilized” people living less abundantly on what are basically reservations, but the general population doesn’t think about them much. They’re too busy eating, drinking, and being merry. And we’re given to understand, by the end, that their blithe, unending circus of pleasure is totally self-perpetuating. There can be no hope of a revolution. The system wins. The end.
My conclusion, as a high school student 20+ years ago, was that 1984 was more a product of its author’s personal experience and (completely justifiable) fears than it was a meaningful predictor of our future. After all, the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and in the year 2000, most of the people I knew were pretty sure democracy was going to take over the world. Freedom for all!
Brave New World, on the other hand, seemed to represent a much more likely dystopia. Even as a teenager, even a decade before Instagram, I could look around and see that everyone was, to at least some degree, sedated by unrelenting hedonism. No one I knew was starving. No one I knew didn’t have a TV, or access to the endless wonders served up by a dial-up modem. Everyone except me seemed to have a Playstation. There were at least three shopping malls within a twenty minute drive of where I lived, in rural Maryland.
Though both of those books were great, and both of them were huge bummers, I remember getting the distinct impression that Huxley had been more prescient than Orwell.
Why we doomscroll
In 1985, Neil Postman wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death, about how an unquenchable thirst for entertainment corrupts our entire social discourse, from politics and journalism to religion and education. That book penetrated our culture deeply enough that I’m certain it influenced my adolescent conclusions, even though I hadn’t actually read it (and still haven’t). After all, Postman himself observed, "In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.”
Though there are indeed parts of the world that can best be described as Orwellian dystopias, my own demographically generic experience can be much more usefully understood through the lens crafted by Huxley. The very fact that you are reading this suggests you can relate.
I believe that our “unquenchable thirst for entertainment” has also corrupted our relationship to fiction.
In some sense, the cultural environment we inhabit has successfully pitted pretty much everything against everything in the great contest for human attention. It even has a name: the Attention Economy. You’ve probably heard that term before, but if not, I would strongly recommend that you go do some reading. The short version is that, thanks to a few early decisions that were made as the Internet achieved near-universal adoption, attention has now been entirely commodified, and pretty much every business is now incentivized to capture as much of it as possible.
This is very bad.
According to the pervasive economics of attention, the most entertaining content wins. And so, without even realizing it, we evaluate almost everything in terms of its ability to entertain us.
I’m aping Postman here, but:
This is why politics has become a circus, and why Donald Trump won the White House.
This is why no one goes to church.
This is why fewer and fewer people are successfully building longterm relationships.
This is why we doomscroll.
This is also why video games (broadly speaking) and TikTok (specifically speaking) have beaten almost every other form of content we have tended to label as “entertainment.” The content that is closest at hand, and most perfectly calibrated to keep us amused for the longest stretch of time, nearly always wins.
The fate of fiction
Unfortunately, in this battle royale of entertainment options, fiction, especially classic literature, is doomed.
Think about it. How many people do you know who, given the choice between a few minutes of scrolling Instagram or a few minutes of reading Moby Dick, would choose the latter?
Let me make it more personal. A friend introduced me to an app that serializes classic, public domain literature, so that you can read it in daily, 10-minute chunks. Cool! I downloaded it and “subscribed” to Bleak House by Charles Dickens, which I’ve been meaning to read for a long time.
That app (Serial Reader, if you’re curious, which, odds are, you aren’t) has been sitting on my homescreen for two months, notifying me at 5pm every day that there’s a new 10-minute section to read. How often do you think I’ve opened up that app to enjoy me some richly dynamic Dickensian characters and singularly beautiful prose? Twice, maybe. And I don’t even have social media apps on my phone.
But hey, the app exists, and has some great reviews, so clearly there are some people who are occasionally making the heroic choice to read classic literature from the public domain instead of watching dance videos.
The point is not that this never happens, the point is that it is extremely rare, which, I’m arguing, is bad.
Well OK so what about nonfiction?
Most people don’t think of nonfiction as entertainment — especially books about productivity and business. I mean sure, you hope that when you crack open one of those books, it’s not a total chore to read. And yes, the best ones are definitely entertaining. But that’s not the reason you picked it up. The book’s primary purpose is not to entertain you.
The fact that you don’t consciously categorize these kinds of books as entertainment allows them to occasionally get an edge over everything you do classify as entertainment in the contest for your attention. This emergent phenomenon, by the way, is a great illustration of the timeless advice that if you can’t win, you should play a different game. In a head-to-head against the latest three hundred million dollar miniseries on your favorite streaming platform, a book about how to be a more effective team leader, or something, gets obliterated.
But that kind of book avoids that contest altogether. Instead, it competes with all the other books that are culturally categorized as potential solutions to quantifiable problems. Think about all the successful people who talk about investing in themselves by consuming nonfiction.
Have you ever heard anyone talk about “investing in themselves” by watching another episode of Game of Thrones?
You get it.
Fiction > entertainment
And yet, great fiction — whether in the form of a classic work of literature, a deeply meaningful film, or a morally complex miniseries — can absolutely be a powerful personal investment.
What I’m suggesting is that the greatest works of fiction shouldn’t be competing with Candy Crush, or FBoy Island.
To at least some degree, we have managed to rescue utility-focused nonfiction from directly competing in a zero-sum brawl with all our other amusements. It’s time we pulled our most powerful stories out of that bloody arena as well. They no more deserve the sole classification of entertainment than do the works of our most celebrated thought-leaders.
In Brave New World, a drug called soma is freely distributed by the government in an attempt to suppress “dangerous” thought and speech. Every single one of us has an infinite supply of this stuff in our pocket. Let’s stop mistaking what could be one of our most powerful antidotes for more of the drug itself.
Because great fiction might actually be our best hope of escaping the garden of numbing pleasures.
More!
This is the 3rd in a series of articles I wrote about how great fiction can be a powerful means of personal development. Here are the other two:
And if you want a twice-weekly infusion of practical wisdom from the best works of classic fiction, check out
. Here's a sample:
It's awesome. People love it. You'll love it.
Uh oh, starting at your section “Well OK so what about nonfiction” and the GEARS STARTED A-TURNING
Why haven’t more fiction and nonfiction authors teamed up? Similar to how a dry historical time period that is covered in something like “SAINTS” can be written in a more creative and ENTERTAINING way so people don't feel as turned off to it?
Why can we do this but even better with the top 5, 10, 25, 100 business books? Finance books? Relationship books? Etcetera - why not pair a book with the primary objective of teaching about productivity or business with a more creative fiction author, and now allow those priorities to become secondary, significantly increasing their effectiveness because those very things will become an INEVITABILITY by virtue of the entertainment value the creative fiction writer brings to it as the new primary focus? They will get in the hands of more readers, and thus in their heads, and finally in their actions.
BUSINESS IDEA BABY. Partnership formed. Umbrella company called something likes “Books Reimaged” and we get permission when relevant and re-author and re-release important nonfiction books in a way that is more palatable and entertaining to the general public.
This message is a binding contract, thus sayeth I. You can help rename the umbrella company to something better since, ya know, you’re the creative one.
OH NO I READ THE NEXT PARAGRAPH
Now scale it to tv shows and movies. Uh oh.
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As usual, I am loving how this particular series makes my brain think and feel. That’s right, my brain has feelings thankyouverymuch.
Keep ‘em coming!
(Apologies for the rant. Migraine + no sleep = some crazy pours out)
I would argue that the reason that most people would choose Instagram over Moby Dick is that Moby Dick is objectively bad fiction. I mean, switching from a traditional 18/19th century framed story to Shakespearean soliloquys in the middle of your story because you started reading the bard is fine for a rough draft. But for the final cut of a great work of fiction? Pick a lane. Please.
I think your analysis about how non-fiction sometimes edges out streaming media because it's not entertainment, and thereby can sometimes win out despite inducing less dopamine or whatever.
I actually do read fiction regularly, but usually not the "great" works of fiction, and especially not the 19th-century, paid-by-the word authors. I managed to make my way through The Brothers Karamazov, sometimes enthralled, but often tired and the slow and aimless plot. I hit random asides in Les Mis about how the author doesn't think there should be monasteries in that day of age, and just put it down. I realized that his issue that he had writers block but had to write X words for his serial was not a problem with my attention. It's just bad writing.
I absolutely have space in my day (or rather evening) for reading, but I have come to realize that a lot of white might have great ideas or themes is packaged in what I believe to be pretty crappy story telling. It's verbose, rambling, and immersion breaking. I do much better with folktales, ancient poetry, or 20th century novels, or the rare 18th and 19th century writers that are trying to fill space (Jane Austin) for example. A lot of times, I lean into pulp over "great" literature precisely because it's better designed for me (helping me forget distractions and immerse myself) rather than targeted at rich upper class in the 18th/19th century pre-TV that was trying to kill time, it didn't have enough distractions.
Ideally, the perfect book would do both. Immerse you in narrative without bloat or editorializing, while hitting you with deep human insight. But I'll be honest... I generally take the immersion over the insight when push comes to shove.