What happens when the binge ends?
Silence. A little nostalgia. A lot of relief.
Also, a lot of reading, writing, going for walks, connecting with friends, cleaning up the home… paying attention to one’s inner dialogue, prioritising of errands and things that would have otherwise waited endlessly, you sketch, you paint, you work out, you cook fresh food.
I’m referring to the Netflix binge — it’s a pandemic these days. In the past two years that I’ve been using the platform, I’ve watched The Good Wife, Suits 2x (All seasons), Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2X, all seasons, because there just aren’t enough comedies and ‘Atypical’ is not my idea of funny), Madam Secretary (dropped in season 2), Anne with an E (all seasons and loved it), That 70s show (dropped out in the 4th season), as well as loads of films and documentaries. Of course, pretty much most of the times when I was watching I was simultaneously and I might admit, absent-mindedly cooking or having a meal or ironing clothes, etc. but there’s also a whole lot of times I was doing none of that. ‘I ’ll pee at the end of this episode’ is a familiar thought.
So also, there have been some priceless learnings.
So what have I learned?
- You binge not because you have nothing better to do but despite having better things to do. Better doesn’t only mean more exciting stuff but also more useful stuff. Not doing this chips away at your productivity, and hence, peace, bit by bit.
- You binge not because you do not have control over yourself but because the content that’s pointed at you falls so well in your comfort zone — thanks to all the customization — that you decide fervently to stick with it.
- You binge because it’s oh soh convenient. No buying tickets, organising a movie date, going to a cinema hall; you download things you want to watch later and you never have to spend a single spare moment alone. If you don’t like a certain series or an episode you just swipe left and you’re done. There’s lots more of similar content to try.
- Just like they put candies at the checkout queue at the till, to entice you to make impulse buys, very similarly our apps are designed to promote, encourage, and entice you the consumer to keep on consuming. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s the basic nature of consumption. If you want to consume something, as a provider I should make it as convenient for you as it is possible to make. That’s their job. After all, you’ll never find a clock in a gambling den.
So, when to say stop is on YOU — and that is the least to be expected. It’s an entirely human situation — nothing we really like to eat is ever healthy, generally speaking. All the bad things are just so much fun, good things so boring. Entertainment series vs documentaries. Netflix vs NatGeo. It’s natural. It’s human. It’s a shitty conflict.
- Another point: Content. That’s what this has come to be about— content. Everywhere you look, people are talking about consuming content, not a particular show or a particular idea, just content. Bales of cloth, mounds of stuff. And in the same way, content. It’s like asking a teenager, “So what did you do at school?” and they say, well, “stuff”.
So, as you can see, when the binge ended, exploration began as a consumer of content and as a content marketer.
I started taking stock of how many books I had cut out of my life, as a music buff how many songs new and old was I not exploring/connecting with, how many moments of peace did I forego in this thrill of “what happens next” one brainless crack after another.
I realise that as a consumer of chick-lit (eye-roll)/ light-hearted romance / comedy content, I have fared much better than the average consumer of horror stories, thriller, or suspense (13 Reasons Why, Ghoul, Sacred Games… etc) which I believe tend to be far more addictive. I didn’t enjoy the cheap erotica that came with ‘She’s Gotta Have It’ and ‘woke’ things like ‘Dear White People’ which was insightful up to a point where they started hitting me with a clear-cut anti-establishment agenda. And that was dumb.
I have friends who routinely sacrifice their weekends at the hallowed altars of Netflix and the rest of the pantheon. They’re still waiting to be saved because a lot of them subscribe to all of the OTT apps. Which is great for the apps, and, I’m sure for my friends too coz they carry the kind of air Columbus must have when he discovered America — they love to recommend new stuff to watch and love to ask if I’ve watched this or that, and reply to some inside joke with ‘Oh, you won’t get it. It’s Sacred Games’. So yes, they’ve benefited socially from consuming all this ‘Kahn-tent’.
The thing is this: I knew I was never gonna binge watch documentaries such as Food Inc, What The Health and such. Coz, regardless of how compelling they are, they’re still documentaries. It’s the storytelling that we fall for, hook, line, and sinker. It’s a kind of evolutionary predisposition I’m sure to find an explanation for in one of Yuval Harari’s books.
The ‘autoplay’ relieves us of the hard work of clicking on a screen every 30–45 minutes as also our brains of having to decide if there’s anything better we’d like to do instead (Oh, forget cooking let’s just order; the next episode begins in 9 seconds). That’s how comfortably it swaddles our brain, protecting it from the effort of making a decision that’s not driven by delayed gratification.
You may not even particularly like the given content — such as Lust Stories which I found pithy, over-the-top, and in places quite idiotic (Netflix OD-ed on Radhika Apte). But, it’s hard to find a better alternative to not having to make a decision. That’s how much we don’t like to exercise our brains. If you were ever looking for an explanation for the unbelievable fame and pull of the Kardashians, this is it.
However, I think I got off lightly for I didn’t fall for Sacred Games or Ghoul. There was a time when every single co-passenger on my train ride was watching Sacred Games. Non-stop. Not kidding. Every person.
Why is it that drama is so binge-worthy and information (in the form of documentaries) is not? (Do note that the binge-worthiness goes up with cringe-worthiness in many cases — Big Boss)
Because we live all that drama in our heads. Every time I see Harvey Specter deliver a sucker punch, I feel a rush. Every time that I see Alicia Florrick win a case in the court or in the courtroom or at home, it gives me a high. Living vicariously, yes. And then comedies make you laugh, endlessly. It’s like being on a merry-go-round that you don’t have to get off.
So it creates pleasure center in our brains perhaps, all this content. Whatever is your poison — thrill, adventure, sex, drama, crime, comedy, romance, you get an endless supply of. Constant reinforcement. You keep going back because it is so you. Finally, somebody understands and speaks your language, and gives you new ideas to explore dimensions that do not/will never exist in your life.
But in the end? What is it truly? Emotional drama, right? It’s something you used to once get from the kind of fiction that is called in French as ‘Romans du gare’ — the kind of books one picks up at a Railway Station. The French went so far to actually recognise it as a genre on its own. Breezy, cheezy, racy. That same model went on to GEC on TVs and now it’s on entertainment apps.
The question we have to answer today is if that drama is more exciting in your life — and it usually is — how much is it worth giving up real life for?
