Choosing Not to Binge
If I am being honest, I love being entertained. As a young boy I loved watching cartoons and movies. In those days, Indian TV channels didn’t have variety. I remember all us kids on summer break piling into a neighbor’s flat because their TV was the only TV that received a grainy signal of Spiderman. No one had cable.
By the sixth of seventh grade, I don’t remember when exactly, we got cable TV in every home. HBO became a household name. It opened the door to a western world that was filled with variety. Way more variety that I was used to. I loved it! Ate it all up!
Now that, I am grown and make my own living, I can access entertainment when and where I like. No parents to nag, no homework to do. The internet modem replaced Cable TV provided even more variety.
To binge meant to over-eat food. Synonyms are engorge, stuff and pig-out. Today, it refers to watching entire seasons of shows in a few sittings. Inhaling it, like you would a drug. Here is The Onion’s jab at it. None of the definitions to binging come from an inspiring place. Another word comes to mind: Cramming, as you would before a test. Cramming can be positive, it means to memorize a lot of subject matter to be successful in a test. But we never say I crammed the second season of Witcher. We say I binged it.
The reason binging fits over cramming is because it is compulsive. No one crams compulsively. Internet-TV hosts like Amazon make binging easy by playing the next episode automatically within seconds after the credits start rolling. You can turn that feature off, as I did, but it didn’t stop me from watching half a dozen seasons of Wheeler Dealer. I have no interest in fixing cars for a living.
Matthew Crawford introduced the idea of Attentional Commons in his book The World Outside Your Head. It is a simple idea, like good ideas are. Crawford proposes untrammeled attention is as valuable as clean air and clean water. We must be free to give our attention to what we choose. At first read, it seems Crawford is talking about Free Will. It also seems our free will is intact so far — Jeff Bezos did not turn on the TV, I did. Bezos did not pick Wheeler Dealer for me, I did. I hit play. And when the show ended, I hit play again to watch the next episode.
Now, imagine a binge-eater’s trouble to choose if every street had an all-you-can-eat restaurant for a low annual subscription of $119. Can you blame them for making the wrong choice? Crawford makes the case that companies with a lot of interest in your attention make it harder and harder for you to make a different choice. Let’s call them Choice Architects — those who are in the business of producing or promoting content you can’t ignore. Shiny new TV shows, Hollywood level CGI, big name performers, and flashy adverts target the same parts of our brain that alert us to the presence of a predator in the Savannah. We are wired for it!
Jeremy Dean said in his book Making Habits Breaking Habits that if we do something weekly then it is a habit, not an intention. At the end of a work day, when I switch on the TV, pick a show and hit play, nobody made me do it. I thought it was my intention and Free Will. But this was the habit working itself out.
This is the recipe for binging: First, Choice Architects plunder our Attentional Commons with sophisticated tools, then our brain habituates and perpetuates. We binge.
Quitting cold-turkey is one option. I considered cancelling my Amazon and Netflix subscription. But I like movies and some of my friends do too. My friends and I have bonded over Crown and Expanse. Last Detective on HBO was a delight of story telling. Jeremy Dean says vigilance can curb the habit at first but the habit comes back stronger. Ask anyone who has tried to quit smoking.
I followed Crawford’s advice and opted for the Epicurean option. Crawford quotes Iris Murdoch:
“Deliberately [changing a habit] is not a jump of the will, it is the acquiring of new objects of attention and thus of new energies as a result of refocusing.”
First, I acquired the habit of reading profusely. And then I made a goal to write about what I read. Collecting good ideas, cultivating them, connecting them together into a rich web, and then writing about them are strong attachment points for the mind. I found they are strong enough to choose the book over the remote control.