TV and Our Discontents

Watching morning TV, I realized that TV is a magnifying glass that brings the overachievers and geniuses of our world into stark relief. We see them there, and they are presented to us in something of an "everybody can do it!" format, and little is ever said that they usually not only have very good educations, but also that they come from class and privilege.

Yet they often become the measuring sticks by which we gauge our lives-how successful we are at home, in our jobs, in our lives.

It's hard to tune out these stories of happy families and supportive parents whose children are now the paragons of who we are supposed to be.

It's equally as hard to tune out the horror stories, or the Horatio Alger stories....

None of these stories is true, though. All are personifications, exaggerations of the realities of life.

Even "reality TV" isn't. The shows are scripted--maybe not as rigidly scripted as a sitcom, but they've still got a script. The shows are also sliced-and-diced (in editing) and digitized for better quality....

All is not what it appears to be. Ever.

And what of stories? Well, all stories seem to be romances. Even murder mysteries are romances--romances with death. I love stuff like Law & Order and CSI, but after awhile I have to turn them off. There are just too many bizarre deaths for me to consider them anything more than sensationalized archetypal renderings of some alternative universe.

Visual hyperbolies.

In many ways, TV can contribute to making us very unhappy. If you're like me, your family is never a TV family--it is neither the worst of the worst, where parent is killing parent (or someone else) nor is it the Wonderful Life expressed in all those biographies and new novels out there....

It is somewhere between, and with TV we can minimize or maximize what it is according to the filter we put on it.

TV becomes our filter and our guide to a Better Life. But it's always a Better Life we can never attain. The standards change, the world changes, and the perfect overachievers we see on TV start their lives pretty young, and from a more than adequate baseline.

It's very easy for me to see why so many people go credit card crazy trying to make their lives perfect--somehow make their lives resemble TV. I think we all do it, to some degree, unless you are a very strong person who was raised with a good sense of self and strong, loving family.

A strong loving family doesn't always bear high achieving memoirists any more than massive dysfunction creates great actors. Sometimes a strong loving family bears the great firefighter or mechanic or nurse or community center director.

But I wonder about others like myself, who didn't come from the strong loving family. Then what? How do we create ourselves when we are bombarded with images of perfection on a regular basis. Do we retreat into the negative images--"well, at least my dad didn't abuse me, nor did my mother bludgeon my dad for the insurance money..."

Or does something else happen?

We can choose to make something else happen, but it takes time. Understanding the realities of where we have been and whether or not it was fair--not normal, because in a TV world, we are never given a true depiction of normal. Normal is kind of boring--it doesn't get ratings.

Normal also doesn't mean accepting dysfunction. It may mean forgiving dysfunction and moving forward, that's for sure. It means even forgiving ourselves for being not so high achieving...

This is one of those reasonings that makes me see the importance of people creating their own media. We've had enough of visions of everyone else. We may want to synthesize ourselves through the lens of media and create images of our lives--the realities of our lives, not the magified funhouse images of our lives--and share those with other people. We want to tell our stories because maybe our stories aren't being told--or at least not told with any veracity nor with any need to placate the gods of ratings.

But even this has a downside.

There are folks out there who would like to convince us that ever uttering and bad behavior of our children is "cute" and somehow everybody should read it. There are other folks who would like us to believe that we should expose every single detail of our lives because it will eventually get us a book deal.

I don't believe in Hortio Alger stories. I never did. Book deals don't happen overnight. They don't particularly land in our laps via email.

Even if they did, could we withstand the scrutiny of others--who, buy not buying our books, may be sending us a message that our lives aren't significant enough to propel us to the top of the New York Times Best Seller list.

And should we care?