How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Sadness

Yeah, things are DEFINITELY going to work out

So, as of late I have been hounded harassed gently encouraged to write some more posts as a sort of insurance to keep the rest of my far more diligent blogger friends accountable to the seething masses. This fundamentally goes against my perspective on writing, which is to say I’m far too lazy to right on a regular basis I only write when I feel particularly inspired. Well, fuck that; peer pressure is hard. So instead of writing something insightful, or clever, or filled to overflowing with Whedon-esque witticisms, I’m going to talk about why I am in love with miserably depressing media.


“But Matt,” the masses drone, “Why would you want to watch something miserable like The Road when you could watch {insert mindless action or comedy title here} where the underdog hero comes out on top and gets not one, but two hotties that put Olivia Wilde to shame?”
No, and here’s why you’re wrong. Sure, it’s nice to just shutdown and watch something that will take your mind off of reality in convenient 30 minutes sessions, but ultimately that just falls short for me. It’s not compelling; it’s not interesting. When I look at media—books, TV, movies, games—I look for escapism; I look for things that let me have some sort of meaningful connection to things I will never experience, people I will never know. Finding a way to establish that emotional attachment and connection to a fantasy is the real struggle.

Let’s run a thought experiment, for science, or whatever. Say my neighbor, a generally cool guy that I’ve had but fleeting contact with as we say our awkward ‘hellos,’ gets a new puppy. People love puppies, I certainly love puppies, and I feign happiness for my neighbor for like 5 seconds, then I move on. Now say I run into that same neighbor, and he tells me that his new puppy got hit by a car. Now I feel legitimately bad for the guy; I probably try and console him, and I will most likely feel sad about it for a while. Honestly, there may even be tears.

See where I’m going with this?

Maybe I just have some sociopathic impulses, but establishing a ‘real’ emotional connection and exercising empathy come much more naturally in times of distress than happiness (there’s actually decent psychological research to support this). So, if I want to actual escape in any meaningful way, it seems to make much more sense to actually invest in something, well, depressing and sad.

Now, I’m sure there are plenty of franchises people love that are all happily-ever-after and whatnot (yes, Twilight, I’m looking at you), but this leads to my second point: happy media is tainted with the festering stench of unreality. Maybe I’m just a pessimist (well, in fact I’m quite sure I am), and I’m sure you could make a compelling argument that I’m just disillusioned and jaded with social disenfranchisement, but things do not always, or even usually, work out for the best. Reality has a defined bias toward grit and unpleasantness, and when a piece of media tries to deny that, it just comes off as fake and kills any chance of attachment for me. As an aside, this is actually my big problem with Star Trek as a franchise and Gene Roddenberry’s secular humanist philosophy; you can’t ignore the fundamentally monstrous nature of humanity and have and twinge of integrity (and yes, there is a whole separate argument to be had about Trek lore here, BRING IT ON).

So where does that leave us?

I don’t mean to suggest that there is no merit in mindless or happy media, as I intake quite a bit of it on a regular basis. My point is that watching The Simpsons is pretty much dessert, the meat and potatoes comes from things like Mad Men.

But that’s just like, my opinion man.