What If Everything is NOT Going To Be OK?

With the advent of Covid-19, we have all gotten used to spending a lot of time in front of screens.

We binge watch Netflix series, we Facetime with friends, and schools are now gearing up to move their classes to Zoom.

While online Zoom learning may seem to be a relatively new phenomenon, we have all, in fact, been attending online educational courses for a very long time — like the past 60 years.

The average person today spends an astonishing 8 hour a day watching TV or videos or Netflix or YouTube, this according to Nielsen, who should know. We spend far more time ‘watching’ stuff than we do reading, exercising, working or even sleeping. Watching is now our number one activity, bar none.

Our grandparents may have gone to the movies once a week, but we now effectively live in a movie theater in our own home. We have been doing this for a very long time.

What is the effect of spending so much of your life watching stuff?

Well, it has educated us.

It has educated us in two very important ways.

First, watching things all the time teaches you, over and over, day after day, to be passive. That, after all, is the job of the watcher. To be passive. People who believe that they can influence the outcome of a Knicks game or effect the course of an episode of Law & Order are, of course, insane. Endless watching for years has honed our skill of passivity to a fine science. We have trained ourselves to be passive observers.

The other thing that years of watching has taught us is that in the end, even though we do nothing, everything will work out fine. It always does. No matter how bad things look for Bond, we know that he will be fine, even thought rescue may come at one minute to what seems to be the end. If a massive asteroid is hurtling toward the earth threatening destruction of all human life, we know that somewhere up there, a wise government has sent some Texas oil drillers to blow it out of the sky before it does any real damage. Even if an advanced life form from another planet sends fleet of space ships the size of cities to destroy us, we know that a few brave airmen and President Bill Pullman will save the earth.

All we have to do is watch.

This is what we all deeply believe.

We do it with Climate Change.

Someone somewhere is going to solve this, right?

And that is why when it comes to the virus, we are pretty confident that somehow this will all resolve itself nicely, because that is what happens every single time in our vast experience and in our very long and compelling video and film education.

Someone, somewhere, in some lab is going to find the cure. Or maybe it’s just really Chloroquine. The virus is going to simply to disappear one day. Sure it will. Because that is how it happens in every TV show and movie I have ever seen.

Magical thinking.

So clearly, this lockdown thing has been going on long enough. We are more than ready for the happy end of this movie. This thing has been going on longer than Shoa (which by the way, did not have such a happy ending).

So it’s time to get back to work. Time to get back to going out to dinner. Time to get back to shopping for clothes and getting mani pedis. Enough is enough.

Isn’t this movie over yet?

You can read more about this in my new book Don’t Watch This! How The Media Are Destroying Your Life.