We are always learning either deliberately or unconsciously. At each moment in time we are absorbing something into our brain, either we are picking up bad habits or good habits, or maybe taking in useful knowledge or useless knowledge, but we are learning nonetheless. That is why you may have heard people say ‘watch what goes in your brain.’
For a lot of people today, entertainment is a high priority, and they can’t go a day without it.
Shikati (2018) posited: Entertainment is the enemy of self-development and personal growth; it is the enemy of education. The moment you choose harmful or time wasting entertainment you place your personal education in the hands of content creators and you give them the power to educate you on whatever they want to feed you. In part, you also place the power to choose the direction in which your life is headed in the hands of someone else.
People spend more time with entertainment media than with any other activity outside of work. Yet given how ubiquitous it is, we have spent far too little effort learning about how entertainment media affects how we think and act.
Parents and policy makers are often inundated with frightening claims about media and technology’s effects on kids. In 2014 one British newspaper compared playing video games to using heroin. In 2017, a headline in The Atlantic asked “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” Recently, there are claims that too much exposure to social media can create depression due to the highly studied FOMO (fear of missing out) theory.
Entertainment is not wrong. In fact, it creates balance in the lives of people. Yet, balance is not going to be attained when too much of it will be consumed. We must not let entertaining ourselves get along with our capacities and responsibilities. It is always wrong to become unproductive due to too much longing for entertainment.
Henry David Thoreau, as always, said it more eloquently than anybody: “A stereotyped, but unconscious despair is concealed under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work.”
In 1787, Edward Gibbon completed his book, “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” giving the following reasons for its destruction: the rapid increase of divorce with the resultant undermining of the home; higher and higher taxes and the spending of public money for free circuses for the people; the mad craze for sports, which became more and more brutal; the building of gigantic armaments, when the real enemy was within, and the decay of religious faith, which faded into formalism and became impotent.
In short, Gibbon concluded that satisfying the desires of the people for comforts and entertainment became more important than their relationship with God and others.
How many family members are not speaking even if they are physically present and are stooped over their smart phones or laptops being “somewhere” else? How many friends prefer to play online games without even asking about their emotional well-being? How man online prayer gatherings are snubbed in lieu of Netflix and YouTube?
This is not to say that all entertainment is destructive or immoral. We need periodic breaks from the routines of life; time out from the daily grind. Jesus told His disciples to “come apart and rest awhile” (Mark 6:31), prompting someone to wisely observe that if we don’t come apart, we’ll come apart.
We must be reasonable enough to prioritize. This is the activity that arranges items or activities in order of importance relative to each other. There is a need for us to consider what is more important first then inject entertainment to create balance and productivity. If we are students, we can prioritize learning over entertaining memes and videos. If we are government workers, we can start with service rather than loafing.
Kids today, and really adults too, expect to be entertained all the time—even when they’re at school and work, observes Gregory Bloom, lecturer and author of Overcoming Entertainment Addiction: How to Cure Your Children of the Need to be Constantly Entertained (Action Publishing Group, 2006).
Amusement or fun addiction has an alarming rise among people today. “Behavioral” addictions have now been widely recognized as non-substance addictions (that can also develop with or without substance addictions). Neuro-imaging techniques and recent research show that it is not only alcohol and recreational drugs that are addictive. Behavioral addictions trigger the same fundamental responses in the body as, for example, cocaine (Grant et al., 2010).
In the end, it is the person to push himself towards that direction. A strong understanding of his/her action is needed for him to steer clear from the damaging effects of too much entertainment consumption.
Let us also create…not just consume.
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