Waiting for Entertainment to Deliver
Earnest found the world a tough place and depended on entertainment to bring him needed escape. He needed to get lost in a novel, a film, music. He needed a world where antagonism was a mere fiction, not reality. He needed escape, but waiting for it was increasingly difficult.
His frustration was great because entertainment had originally been so, well, entertaining. You had to go to a theatre or sports arena, which was expensive and inconvenient. Then cable TV arrived, then the internet, then streaming services. It was a cornucopia of entertainment, to be enjoyed from your couch, wonderfully overflowing every day.
That was then.
Now the cultural industries cranked out tons for streamers, with plots done thousands of times already. Plus the new stuff had to compete with the classics. Sitting on the couch was closer to running to nowhere on a treadmill. He sought the new and different, not clever twists on a genre. He stumbled through an endless swamp.
It was clear he had no choice but to entertain himself. He thought he’d be a jerk to jerk off. To find entertainment, he had to leave his couch. He had to decrease his reliance on the media for entertainment. Earnest had to find entertainment where he never tried looking.
The search itself he found entertaining.