Two Aspirins and a Comedy by Metta Spencer

Author:Metta Spencer [Spencer, Metta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317250012
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2015-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

Sensation and Meaning

The twenty-five most successful movies (the ones mentioned earlier that killed nine billion people) were popular. People paid to see them. Blaming is exciting. It gives us meaning, just as hatred and wars give us meaning. Something important is at stake. We feel alive, committed, engaged, justified.

If a primary motive for blaming is to mask the everyday lack of meaning, then writers face an ethical dilemma. If they diminish the culture of blame, they must provide some compensation. This is possible. The entertainment industry can stimulate the autonomic nervous system—including adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, and the nucleus accumbens area of the brain, which is responsible for the uptake of dopamine52—by portraying the novel adventures of people who are living bravely and meaningfully in the service of humankind. But this approach will require new thinking.

Researcher Mary-Wynne Ashford distinguishes between two problems, both of which may manifest as boredom: unsatisfied sensation seeking, on the one hand, and meaninglessness, on the other. (Some people experience both.) Sensation seekers often are dependent on aggressive or hostile entertainment.53 The thinness of their sense of meaning may give rise to a fascination with blame, which masks the emptiness while also creating the psychological conditions for mimetic rivalry and violence.

To address meaninglessness as a source of boredom, a more cognitive approach is needed. This is compatible with the production of more arousing, prosocial entertainment. Writers can address meaninglessness as a core existential problem, ideally by pointing toward answers instead of merely illustrating the despair that it causes. Stories can assist meaning seekers by showing potential sources of genuine purpose.

Viktor E. Frankl was a psychiatrist who created “logotherapy” as a treatment for meaninglessness. He offered no generic answers to it but helped individuals locate meaning, moment by moment. Frankl wrote that “mass neurosis of the present time can be described as a private and personal form of nihilism; for nihilism can be defined as the contention that being has no meaning.”54

Frankl spent much of World War II as a Jewish prisoner in Nazi death camps. His book recounts not only horrors but also inspiring insights. Even while suffering physically, he remained free inwardly and sometimes felt joy. He thought often about his wife and spoke to her in his mind. She was already dead, though he had no way of knowing it. The meaning of his life, at such a moment, was just to keep on loving her. He wrote, “In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way—an honorable way—in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.”55

Frankl shared with the other prisoners his awareness that, moment by moment, life presents us with assignments directed uniquely to oneself. Life “calls” on us, he said, and we must actively discover its full message as we go through our day. That is its meaning. Happiness is a by-product of our search, our willingness to make the most of each possibility.

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