Television Meditation


TV (by which I mean the Film and Television medium) is the great modern meditation. Before you roll your eyes, hear me out. It’s one of the easiest ways to shut your brain off, escape, and transport yourself to another world. It’s powerful because it hooks into human imagination. How else can we so easily relate to characters with drastically different lives than ourselves, be it a lawyer, cop, billionaire, or superhero? TV is the visual representation of reading a book. Sports and other live TV gives us a chance to connect with other humans and experience a moment together; think Olympics, the World Cup, or an election night. TV is the original livestream. Reality TV gives us insight into how others live and learn about businesses, places to travel, and food to eat. Did I mention the news? TV expands your horizons. With so much content, TV is the original “netflix and chill,” the binging euphemism for a couch potato, whose actions are not too dissimilar from someone in a 3hr meditation. And when you’re fully engrossed in a film, caught in the trance of TV, is that not enlightenment? 

Ok, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, but being immersed in the spectacle is what I love about TV. Anything that distracts from the spectacle, or breaks the trance, gets on my nerves. My major qualm with TV is when the business of the industry seeps into the content itself. Let’s call it meta-interference. Honestly, this section should be a separate blog post in and of itself, but here are a few examples of meta-interference. I don’t want to learn that they rushed the end season of Game Of Thrones because of cost overruns (made up example, not true). I don’t want a rendition of Batman and Spiderman every decade. I don’t want a country to censor the plot of a movie. I don’t want the Amazon X-ray to overlay what music is being played or what actors are in the scene I’m watching. I don’t want an actor to be cast for multiple characters in the same fictional universe: Josh Brolin is Cable and Thanos?


Let me fully immerse myself into the story and reach enlightenment.

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