Are We Addicted To Entertainment?

In David Foster Wallace’s behemoth novel Infinite Jest, there is a film that is so entertaining that once people see it, they cannot stop watching it. All they want to do is keep watching the film: they don’t want to eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, have sex, or what-have-you. They just want to watch the film. Part of Wallace’s point here is that American society (perhaps Western society) has a serious addiction to entertainment; in a way, there’s a dangerous irony that people finish the 1,079 page novel…it sort of proves Wallace’s point. (That said, many people never get around to finishing the damn thing.)

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Here’s the thing. Today, I finished the third season of Breaking Bad. In a previous post, I talked a little about my admiration for the show. Indeed, it’s a great show and worth watching for those of you who are unfamiliar. However, there’s a weird, uncomfortable caveat about the fact that I’m already starting to dig into the fourth season, which is that I started watching the show only about three weeks ago.

In my post about John K. Samson’s‘petition song,’ this blog entered the unlikely world of math, so I figured that I might keep the numbers going. Let’s say, for ease of calculation, that each episode of Breaking Bad is roughly 45 minutes long. There are seven episodes in the first season, 13 in the second, and 13 in the third. That…wait a minute, I’ve got this…is 33 episodes. Broken down into hours, I’ve spent more than a day of my life watching Breaking Bad.

In the long run, that might not sound so disturbing. An episode every week for a bunch of weeks in a row over a few years doesn’t exactly scream addiction. But an entire day out of the past 21 days of my life? Could Breaking Bad really have done that to me?

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I wish that Spotify and iTunes had a built-in log feature just so I could run a little experiment. If my indulgence in Walter White’s meth-centered life is somewhat disturbing, then I figure that the amount of music I listen to on a regular basis would really knock me out. How much time do I spend listening to music—even if there’s multi-tasking involved, i.e. I’m listening to M83’s album Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming as I write this—over the course of a day? A week? A month? How much of my life is being filled in that way?

What about books? While reading isn’t exactly a pastime engaged in by most of the world—music and film seem to have more and more of a monopoly on the entertainment front—that’s a terrifying question for an English major. How much time do I spend?

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Am I an addict?


[More on this subject later...]