I was having a fun philosophical discussion with a friend the other day, because I like fun philosophical discussions. He was bemoaning the fact that "kids these days" are always escaping reality. Escaping into drugs, into video games, into whacking it to porn, into whatever. I kept trying to lead him to a conclusion. Why are they trying to escape reality? We went 'round and 'round in circles with this, and I never really got the answer I'd hoped to get: because reality fucking bites. If we'd been able to arrive at that one basic premise, we could have explored some deeper topics: why is it this way, has it always been thus, and can we make it better? I can't answer the first question. I can sorta answer the third, and I'd argue to some extent that it is getting better in dribs and drabs, in a 1.99 steps forward, 0.98 steps back kind of way. The only question I can answer is the second. Yes, it has always been thus. At least, during recorded history.
Today, people escape with things like video games, or meth, or whatever. Centuries ago, they had other forms of escape.
I remember reading in a book one time about how a guy met his wife while watching a housefire. Because that was apparently a thing that people did hundreds of years ago: gather to watch housefires. I can just hear this poor guy saying, "The fuck did you expect us to do? It's not like we had Desperate Housewives or Keeping up with the Cardassians or whatever pap y'all are watching on the tube in 2024. We had Desperate Housefires instead, real ones, and we dug it!"
Had we lived in Elizabethan England, we might have gone to a bear baiting to escape our dull and dreary existences. I've read descriptions; they were pretty fucking brutal. Find one and read it, if you have a strong stomach.
Then there was the perennial favorite, the public execution! Because isn't it exciting to watch enemies of the state die in the most horrible ways you can imagine? I wonder how many people met their soulmates there. It's like okcupid, but with a lot more blood.
And lest we forget, if you lived in Catholic Europe from the middle ages up until a couple hundred years ago, you could probably find an auto da fe. You could go watch some heretics burn, or maybe just watch their books burn, or maybe both.
Before you call me an anti-Catholic bigot, the Protestants were doing it too. They just didn't call 'em auto da fe.
Maybe you'd prefer Ancient Rome? The national sport seemed to be watching people kill each other or fight animals.
Or perhaps you're one of these people who thinks politics is too polarized. Take your time machine back to 6th century Constantinople and see how things were done in a more civilized age.
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We don't even have to go too far back in time to find people engaging in some deeply shitty forms of entertainment. A hundred years ago, you didn't have TV to watch, but you could spy on the neighbors and poke your meddlesome little nose where it doesn't belong. Or maybe you could find some nerds, some outsiders, some freaks to pick on. That's a perennial source of jolly good times, even today, when there are much healthier pursuits like playing video games and jerking off to porn on the net.
We can blame people for this unending pageant of cruelty called history, and moan about "kids these days", because that always works out well. Or we can instead try and figure out what the fuck is wrong and how the fuck we're going to fix it.