Now wait a moment. Isn’t this just a rehashing of the old Marxist critique of consumer capitalism that we are all dupes whose minds are manipulated by clever and devious marketing executives who in effect make our purchasing decisions for us, devise cunning ways to tap into our impulsive instincts, and get us to buy things we don’t really need? Aren’t there very good and relatively innocent reasons why we might want to buy a pair of Nike sneakers – because, for instance, they are a superior product, and we need them to go running? And what’s wrong with buying stuff anyway if it makes you feel good about yourself?
I happen to think that critics like John Berger and George Monbiot are largely correct. Nobody really believes the official industry line that advertising is a neutral medium that simply provides us with objective information to help us make better choices. Marketing and brand specialists are incredibly successful at creating needs we never knew we had and getting us to buy their products – does anyone really need onion goggles? The reason they spend billions of dollars on advertising each year, and hire in psychologists as highly paid consultants, is because it works. Few of us like to admit that we are personally prone to their tactics. We wish to believe that our consumer choices are of our own free will and reflect our personal aesthetic. So you decide to buy that great art deco lampshade or new armchair with the 1960s retro look you really love. But then why do remarkably similar items appear in the homes of three of your friends? Because the brains behind the brands have made some of our choices on our behalves. We call it, somewhat innocently, fashion.
I’m certainly not saying that all our consumer purchases are the product of psychological manipulation – quality, convenience, beauty and sheer usefulness dictate much of what we buy. Your iPhone not only looks cool but allows you to find your way when you’re lost, get an emergency pick-up when your car breaks down, or film your child taking her first tottering steps. The point, however, is that there is more hidden persuasion going on than we think.30 Anyone who is serious about carpe diem needs to step back and consider the ways their life is shaped by consumer society, and not succumb to the comforting belief that everyone but themselves is influenced by it.
As the merry-go-round of commerce keeps turning, and we spend more and more of our lives working hard to buy all the things that we believe will bring us happiness, we should stop to think about whether seizing the credit card or the shopping trolley is really the best way to seize the day. We might wish to bask in the pleasures of consumer choice. But what is the value of being able to choose amongst sixty-three models of Nike Air Max shoes (yes, sixty-three), seventeen types of coffee at a corporate coffee chain, or over thirty kinds of garden spade on Amazon? Is this the kind of freedom that really matters? The great tragedy we must face is that, over the past century, our lives have been increasingly enveloped by a culture of consumer-infused carpe diem where the way we just do it is to just buy it. It’s time to break free of the chain stores.
JUST WATCH IT: HOW THE PLEASURES OF TELEVISION PRODUCED AN ERA OF PROXY LIVING
I loved television as a kid, fitting in an hour before school each day (Thunderbirds, Superheroes) and at least an hour-and-a-half before dinner (5.30: Wheel of Fortune, 6.00: The Goodies, 6.30: Dr Who). Ask people what they get out of it, and you will receive a variety of answers that help explain why it is the most popular leisure pursuit in the Western world. It helps us relax and unwind after a stressful day at work. It offers an escape into inaccessible worlds: the romance of a period drama, the excitement of an action thriller, an adventurous trek through the jungles of Borneo. It’s a cure for loneliness, especially for the elderly and isolated. Exhausted parents know that it’s a great way to keep the kids quiet while they make dinner or put their feet up for half an hour. Families can bond in front of the set, chatting and catching up during the ads. And viewers can find plenty of programmes that are educational and informative: news, nature shows, history documentaries.31
What I didn’t realise as a teenager, as I sat on my beanbag in suburban Sydney making the agonising decision whether to break tradition and watch Gilligan’s Island instead of The Goodies, was that I was absorbed in a ritual that ranks as one of the most momentous cultural transformations ever experienced by humankind. Within less than fifty years of the first ever television demonstration in Selfridges department store in London in 1925, around 99% of Western households had a set in their homes. Today the typical European or American watches an average of around three hours per day, whether it’s on flat screen TVs, computers, phones or other devices (most people, by the way, greatly underestimate how much they actually watch). This is apart from time spent engaged in digital pursuits such as internet surfing, social media, texting or video games. So television takes up a full 50% of our leisure time, and more time than we spend doing any other single activity apart from work or sleep.32 Perhaps the best way to grasp how much TV has colonised our lives is to tape the following statistic to your remote control: assuming your viewing habits are somewhere near average, if you live to seventy-five, you will have spent around nine years of your life watching television.
Let me try that again. Imagine being on your deathbed, gazing back at your life – the successes and failures, the loves, the regrets, the good times and bad. Nearly a decade of it will have been spent staring at the tube. I doubt many of us will look back and treasure the memories of watching reruns of The Big Bang Theory.
In a digital world of smartphones and iPads, you might have thought that television no longer retains such a hold on our lives, and if there is anything that threatens to hijack carpe diem, it is more likely to be all that time we spend fiddling with our phones and checking our social media feeds. But the time-use data reveals that TV remains by far the dominant force in our 24/7 digital existence. According to one of the most detailed studies of how much time US adults spend using different electronic devices, 12% of the daily total is using a smartphone, 9% on a PC, 4% with a tablet and 18% listening to the radio. And the figure that dwarfs them all? Television, at 51%, which we watch at scheduled times and for which we increasingly use ‘on demand’ or ‘catch-up’ services.33 It is true that people aged eighteen to thirty-five tend to watch less TV than the average, and that much of the time people are watching they are also multitasking on other devices. But in general, even those addicted to checking their phones end up giving a sizeable chunk of each day to John Logie Baird’s wondrous invention of television. As a seminal report on teenage media use concluded, ‘even in this new media world, television viewing – of one form or another – continues to dominate media consumption.’34
So here’s the question we need to ask: How does the absolutely staggering amount of time we grant to watching TV – however and wherever we do it – impact on our capacity to seize the day?
Ever since it became a globally dominant cultural force in the 1970s, television has attracted serious critiques. Does TV violence breed violence in society? Is corporate media distorting the news? Are fast food commercials turning our kids into obese junk-food addicts? Most criticism and debate has concerned the content. My interest, however, is in the medium itself rather than the message.
If I were to ask you to seize the day, right here and now, it is unlikely that you would switch on the television and start flicking through the channels. Most people recognise TV is a step removed from real-life experience. Carpe diem is about seizing experiences for yourself, not gazing at others seizing them on a screen. There is a big difference between going to a tango class and watching celebrities tango on Strictly Come Dancing. Similarly, your palms might sweat watching an exciting tennis match on TV, but it’s nothing like the sweat you get from running around a court yourself.
This point was powerfully made in the classic 1978 book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, written by the former TV advertising executive Jerry Mander. ‘In one generation, out of hundreds of thousands in human evolution,’ he wrote, ‘America had become the first culture to have subst
ituted secondary, mediated versions of experience for direct experience of the world.’35 Mander was keen to emphasise that mediated experience was not in itself a new development. With the expansion of literacy in the eighteenth century, for instance, books became a major conduit through which we gained knowledge or were entertained. But in Mander’s view, television submerged us in artificial environments like never before, accelerating the spread of mediated experience and ushering in a new age of proxy living. It became normal to sit in front of a screen and spend a substantial portion of each day watching other people live their lives – or actors pretending to be other people – instead of living our own. In historical terms, this was nothing short of bizarre.
Wasn’t Mander going too far by branding television as an artificial activity distinct from genuine life experience? It is certainly true that watching TV is an experience of sorts. We engage our senses (at least our eyes and ears), and it can be a communal pastime – like when we go to a bar to watch a World Cup final or the Super Bowl. Also, due to digital recording and streaming technology, we now actively choose what to watch and when to watch it more than ever before.
In general, however, it is an unusually passive way of engaging with life. Sure, we might sometimes press a button that allows us to vote in a reality TV show, but most of the time we are just gazing at the screen, interrupted by snatched conversation during commercial breaks or sending a quick text to a friend. Unlike many other digital activities such as Skyping with your mum or playing online Scrabble against your best friend who lives in a different city, television offers little scope for participation or interaction, placing it at the far end of the spectrum of passive experience. TV might be a great way to relax, it might make you laugh or cry, and it can certainly be more informative or enlightening than scrolling through Facebook updates. But it is a poor surrogate for the pulsating sense of aliveness and active engagement that is the essence of seizing the day. We experience the world filtered through a prism of electronic flickers of light, through a two-dimensional model of reality created for us by sitcoms, news features, cartoons, crime series and reality TV programmes (which, as we all know, are full of fabricated moments and artificially induced drama). As the cultural critic Guy Debord prophetically put it in the late 1960s, we have immersed ourselves in a ‘society of the spectacle’ where ‘everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation’.36 Well, not everything. Only nine years of it.
For all the pleasures that television brings, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the sheer volume of second-hand experience that has come to occupy most people’s lives – irrespective of class, race, gender or age – represents a colossal hijacking of our carpe diem potential. While our medieval ancestors threw themselves into Carnival, we are now satisfied with watching a thirty-minute documentary about it. What is more, the three hours we dedicate to TV each day robs us of precious time that we could be using to do a multitude of other activities, whether it is learning to play the ukulele, training your dog to catch a frisbee, doing a daily meditation session, or inventing a new kind of solar panel in your back shed. You are unlikely to make much progress in any of these if your default evening activity is settling down in front of the television. Would history’s greatest carpe diem adventurers, from Marco Polo to Amelia Earhart, have been TV addicts? I doubt it. They were addicted to the heady business of experiential living (though I’m sure Marco Polo would have been blogging and tweeting on his journeys).
Might not a travel show inspire us to embark on a cycling expedition across the Sahara, or a creative children’s programme show kids how to make a fort out of lollipop sticks?37 Can’t TV motivate us to get up off the sofa and propel ourselves into life? Yes… but only occasionally. Decades of research shows that television generally acts as an experiential soporific. Switching on the TV tends to switch us off from so much else. For a start, it’s bad news for our sex life: people with a television set in their bedroom have half as much sex as those who don’t.38 It makes us less active: heavy TV viewers tend to do less sport or physical exercise, especially if they are women.39 High television consumption is associated with low levels of civic and political engagement, for example in volunteering, voting and protesting.40 And it isn’t great for kids: pre-schoolers who spend lots of time looking at screens spend less time in creative play and constructive problem-solving.41
One other small point I forgot to mention: television will kill you. During the course of my research I came across a startling article in the respected British Journal of Sports Medicine that concluded: ‘On average, every single hour of TV viewed after the age of 25 reduces the viewer’s life expectancy by 21.8 minutes’.42 If anything was going to stop you seizing the day – or doing anything else – it would be premature death. But could this statistic possibly be true? Was watching an hour of Sherlock a veritable death sentence? What I discovered was a whole field of public health research, based on the study of tens of thousands of people, proving over and again that TV viewing, and other forms of sedentary behaviour such as sitting at a computer all day, go hand in hand with increased risk of death, particularly from cardiovascular disease. Experts in preventative medicine are starting to recognise that human beings simply aren’t designed for long periods of sitting still. Doing so may, for instance, have a detrimental effect on how our bodies process fats and other substances, leading to greater risk of serious heart problems.43
The curious thing about the above arguments is that they are unlikely to convince you to watch less television. The reason is that TV has such powerful addictive qualities. People can have a strong sense that they should be watching less but find themselves unable to reduce their viewing time: surveys reveal that 40% of adults and 70% of teenagers say they watch too much TV, and 10% of adults describe themselves as addicts. Researchers in Germany found that people who try to resist the urge to watch television fail around half the time, and are much better at resisting the desire to nap or snack. Other studies show that the longer people watch, the less enjoyment they get from it – yet they don’t have the willpower to switch it off even if the programme is boring.44 Think how many times you’ve come to the end of a programme or film and thought to yourself, ‘Why did I just waste my time watching that junk?’ It happens to me more often than I’d like to admit.
Simultaneously stimulating and relaxing, watching television develops into an almost physiological craving: we become desperate for an injection on a daily basis.45 The addictive nature of television makes it disconcertingly similar to the happy drug soma used to dope up the inhabitants of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Of course we all need regular doses of relaxation. But might there not be other ways of relieving tension and anxiety – like a massage from your lover (if you can get it) or a long candlelit bath (if you can’t)? Isn’t it more fun to laugh with your friends than with the studio audience on TV? Aren’t there better ways of keeping up with world events than an evening news programme that offers only a handful of two-minute stories that are carefully selected for their visual interest, dramatic content and ‘packagability’ as much as newsworthiness?46 Wouldn’t we be better off engaging in activities involving some skill or effort (from gardening to woodworking), which research reveals to provide far more satisfaction than watching TV?47 Ultimately, is it really worth granting nine years of our precious existence to the second-hand pleasures of television when we might be having more direct experience of the world?
I’m not suggesting that we ought to abandon television entirely. Ever since the ancient Greeks invented public theatre, human beings have loved being entertained – that’s why I’ve just binged on the superb six-part BBC drama Wolf Hall. TV can be far more than entertainment too: I’m sure I learned a lot more about American society from watching The Wire than reading a bunch of sociology textbooks, and I wouldn’t want to give up the holy father–son bonding ritual of watching test cricket with my dad. But if we hope to bring more carpe diem i
nto our lives, there may be no more obvious action to take than this: cut back the television hours and win back the seize-the-day opportunities that have been hijacked from us.
While television remains dominant in our increasingly screen-based lives, other forms of digital media also pose challenges for carpe diem living. We may need to devise strategies to regulate our exposure to all of them. Some people put themselves on a digital diet, using apps such as Anti-Social, which switches off access to tempting websites you specify such as YouTube, Facebook or Netflix. Others go cold-turkey by using Freedom, which turns off internet connectivity completely for a set time period. When it comes to the television set, you could try keeping it in a cupboard at the top of the house and only bring it out if you really want to watch something (it’s an extreme measure, but it worked for me). A less eccentric option would be to ration yourself a set number of viewing hours each week.
The evidence suggests that one of the best ways to break the habit is to write down a list of easily available and enjoyable non-TV activities that you can consult each time you are about to perform the reflex action of switching on the television.48 Stick them to the screen with a Post-it note if necessary. It will force you into making a genuine choice: is watching this programme what I really want to be doing with my life at this very moment (it could well be) – or is there some better alternative? This strategy sounds almost too artificial, but it could be the first tiny but significant step toward a life driven by a new habit: to just do it instead of just watch it. Dust off that ukulele and get ready to play.
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