we are amusing ourselves to death
On constant consumption, information overload, and boredom as resistance.
Following a coastal walking route between my hometown and the next one over one sunny afternoon in September I kept a podcast on very loud. On this occasion I kept a podcast on very loud not to find out what the current world events were but in an effort to fill the silence. Somewhere between the second and third recreational area it occurred to me that during the course of any given week I consumed a considerable amount of informative content whose information I was not able to recall. Somewhere before the last cliff it also occurred to me that the realisation of that particular afternoon was going to present itself as a contretemps in my blissful, entertained existence.
In 1948 George Orwell wrote in a book that told us what we knew already that “the best books are those that tell you what you know already”, and ever since then and certainly even before we have turned to texts as sources of wisdom that eloquently communicate our inner beliefs as well as facilitate the awakening to our own realities. Yet at the kernel of my particular realisation that afternoon it was not Orwell’s novel that lay, but Ray Bradbury’s (equally dreary and prescient) Fahrenheit 451.
In rather a clichéd dystopian trope, Fahrenheit 451 tells the story of a man awakening to the reality that society is profoundly oppressive and resolving to resist. The protagonist is a fireman named Montag, who comes to question the nature of his profession; for in Bradbury’s universe firefighters are tasked not with the putting out of fires but with their starting, particularly in an effort to hunt for literature and destroy it. The novel has been justifiably extolled to the skies both within the dystopian genre and as the author’s chef-d'oeuvre, generally regarded as the seminal text on censorship and particularly relevant at a time when book bans are ever-rising.
The idea is simple enough: the proliferation of the diverse viewpoints that literature begets thwarts the strength and stability of the state, hence books are destroyed and only a narrow set of views is allowed among the general populus. Even people who have not read Fahrenheit 451 recognise its title as the temperature at which paper burns and know it as a searing indictment of government censorship. It is then rather startling to discover that Bradbury himself argued against this interpretation of his story.
“Fahrenheit 451 is not,” he says firmly, “a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.” In an interview for LA Weekly, the writer states that he meant his 1953 novel as “a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.” Quoting his words in the video below, his main concern was with people “being turned into morons by TV.”
Empty the theatres save for clowns and furnish the rooms with glass walls and pretty colours running up and down the walls like confetti or blood or sherry or sauterne. […] More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don’t have to think, eh? Organize and organize and superorganize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee. […] Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive. And the three dimensional sex magazines, of course.
I hope you will allow me to jump in time once more and take you to 1985, when the sociologist Neil Postman published an essay titled Amusing Ourselves to Death. In the text, he explores the effects of television and its extraordinary ability to hold our attention merely through entertainment value, posing questions such as “What is television? What kinds of conversations does it permit? What are the intellectual tendencies it encourages? What sort of culture does it produce?”1. Bradbury’s protagonist knows about these issues all too well: he lives in a house reigned by the parlor, a sort of whole-room TV starring interactive characters with whom his wife develops an attachment so intense as to call them “her family”. The Government in Fahrenheit 451 knows that censorship is only a minor part of their control strategy, for even more efficient is the information campaign they yield on the minds of their citizens.
As exemplified by these texts, I am not the first person to declare that technology fosters alienation. Postman argued that society in the late 20th century had become transfixed with the screen, and that television had made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience2. Entertainment as the opium of the masses, lulling our misery and creating a fall sense of connection; we have all heard about it before. What Farenheit 451 told me, though I knew it already, is that the true horror of entertainment culture is the acceleration of information. As a character in the novel puts it:3
Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click? Pic? Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!
Screens seem to stir up social discomforts at levels not easily plumbed. It would be self-evident to assert that Bradbury’s prophesized parlors have been realised in the omnipresent smartphones, and to mention the effects of social media in any space is to invite a kind of moralising conversation I am not interested in. I am not arguing against entertainment or advocating for complete abstinence from any type of consumption, never mind sharing a quasi-political statement about going analogue. Yes, filling our minds with content that does not enrich, challenge, or teach us but simply appeals to our senses or our short-term emotions is damaging. Of course, in an ideal world we would never allow ourselves to relax in a world of pixels and pleasure. I understand, however, that working conditions taxes the mind and often leaves little room for more than lighthearted media. Being entertained is not a moral failure. What I am writing about is amount and speed.
The modern world leaves little room for pause, information reaching us in a relentless stream faster than we can meaningfully absorb. In just a few minutes of scrolling, I passed updates on escalating conflicts in Eastern Europe, record-breaking heatwaves, a mass shooting, and a viral influencer scandal. Each story appeared, then vanished, before it could fully register. Tragedy and triviality were flattened into the same moment; a loss of life was given no more space than online gossip. Entertainment is immediate and, thanks to algorithmic engines, unlimited and all-encompassing. With stimulation as our only constant, numbness becomes inevitable.
I had resisted the recognition for a long time, but so distressing was the idea during my walk that I had no other choice but to admit it to myself. This matter does not merely apply to what has been deemed as “mindless” content. From my high horse I had believed myself to stand above the simplification and annulment of thought: I watched long video essays, listened to podcasts on recent news, read Substack articles, and overall kept myself away from what I had sententiously regarded as inane media; I was perforce safe. Of course this perspective is petulant and condescending. It is also largely factitious.
Skincare tutorials, reading hauls, or critical analyses on the philosophy of Machiavelli, having a constant stream of content playing for your eyes and ears is detrimental regardless of your topic of choice. Not too long ago I realised that the educational potential of the information I was consuming did not matter forasmuch as I was being bombarded by it. I was, admittedly, addicted to information: podcasts during walks, articles as I was waiting in line, books while eating. Once a story ended, I automatically reached for the next one, averse to the idea of nothingness. In the name of learning and productivity, I took to filling every spare second with noise, which had the dual effect of occupying my mind with others’ ideas, and saturating it so much that no fact was really assimilated. We have become dependent on constant input, and our brains have forgotten how to exist without being fed information.
Our thoughts need space to breathe, and in a world designed to overwhelm us, idleness becomes an act of resistance. As Srinivasan Sitharaman writes,
Not only does scrolling pulverise our attention spans but it robs us of the chance to be bored. Creative ideas emerge during low-input states, not high stimulation. That’s probably why “shower thoughts” are a thing. There’s nothing to distract you in the shower, and you can let yourself daydream about being interviewed on a talk show, or intercepting a bank heist, or other less egotistical things that I wouldn’t personally know about.
Boredom has never been pleasant, but it is formative: it teaches people how to tolerate delay and stay engaged when effort outpaces reward. The habits that sustain serious thought, such as deliberation or patience, are built in moments that feel dull or unproductive. The erosion of boredom that results from constant entertainment leaves us uneasy in our own company, silence feeling like a problem to be solved rather than a condition to inhabit. When moments that once allowed for reflection are treated as gaps that demand to be filled, we become trained to outsource thinking itself, relying on a constant flow of external prompts rather than developing our own lines of inquiry. In his essay on Fahrenheit 451, Joseph Folley argues:
While censorship prevents people from accessing those oh-so-dangerous ideas, this information overload means that everyone is too busy processing each new opinion, statement, and “fact” flung at them that they eventually just give up. The world is made incomprehensible, and in that confusion they will do what they are told. There is no way to offer up a competing vision for the world, or even come up with a new thought. The discourse of Fahrenheit 451 consists of pure repetition, and that is exactly how Beatty thinks it should be. No disagreement is possible if there is no way to come to your own opinion in the first place.
We can learn a lot from this twin strategy followed by the government of Fahrenheit 451. Its aim is simple: isolate people from independent thought, and then keep them fed on a diet of entertaining, empty bullshit.
The idea that all types of content have certain irreducible effects seemed never to have occurred to me before that walk, but now that I have realised it I am committed to relearning how to be bored. Intentional idleness requires resisting the reflex to reach for stimulation and allowing attention to settle, however uncomfortable that may be at first. In those unsettled moments, I expect thoughts to connect and questions to sharpen, but the truth is that even if that does not happen and brilliance fails to emerge from my silent existence, I am happy to simply develop the ability to enjoy the company of my own mind. In a culture addicted to immediacy and stimulation, that may be one of the most radical skills we can recover. Somewhere before the next town over, I took my headphones out. I would rather live bored than die amused.
People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.
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if you liked this post, you would probably enjoy:
Postman, p. 84.
Postman, p. 87.
Bradbury, p. 57.
laura as always this is beautifully crafted! i adore neil postman and amusing ourselves to death is such an illuminating book. it's kind of insane to think about how these people have somehow predicted the way our lives are now shaped. i deeply relate to the notion of consuming "educational" media as if the constant stimulation itself is not a problem, so here's to relearning boredom!
That idea of never ending consumption reminds me of a book called “Brave New World”. It’s the inspiration for the book “1984”. BNW does an interesting different take on oppressive governments with 1984 being overt in the subjugation of their population BNW takes the route of subjugation through entertainment and distraction that makes the people happy but empty. Excellent essay!