I gotta thank multiculturalism for weaning me off entertainment. I didn’t even see it coming.

I used to sit around watching movies and television just like everybody else, night after night, and it was fine for a while. Then they started this gradual thing where they had to keep shoving in random ethnic characters along with their ethnic ideology. After a while it occurred to me that none of the plots mattered anyway. They were all about things that didn’t amount to much, and once you noticed it you couldn’t un-notice it. The stories stopped feeling like stories and started feeling like assignments.

See, when you looked at these shows, there was never anything of interest from East Asian or West Asian people in a Western setting. Nor could you realistically expect there to be. It wasn’t fair to them, given their inclinations and abilities, and I don’t know much but I know that much. And it didn’t matter what the other groups said or did either. You already knew what the Hispanics were going to say and do. You already knew what the blacks were going to say and do. It was more or less tiresome whether it was fiction or the evening news. You could tell ahead of time how it was all going to play out. And nobody was going to watch a show that showed Jewish characteristics in that way. It wouldn’t have been fair. You’d think somebody would want to see that, but they didn’t, and that was that. The culture decided real stories weren’t the point anymore.

Sports were no different, and that’s the thing about sports. Obviously irrelevant. Winning or losing some constructed contest didn’t matter. Nor did championships. You’d have grown men at work talking about the game like it meant something, going on and on about it like they were there, like they had something to do with it. Grown men watching other grown men throw a ball around to score points. You might as well sit on the sofa and watch a bunch of guys take turns with your wife. The spectator would cheer the action on his wife, eat the food he had grilled along with the high-carb snacks, and then go to the water cooler the next day and tell his coworkers how excited he got, how he hoped it would go next time, and what he ate while it was happening. And the crazy part is they’d listen. They’d stand there nodding like it was important information, like he was telling them something they needed to know about the world. Like the whole point of living was to watch things happen to other people and then report back on the snacks.

But watching isn’t living. I don’t care who you are, that’s just the truth of it. The spectator achieves nothing. He just forms an opinion about some trivial amusement, and that opinion is badly disconnected from any real understanding because he observed it passively from a distance without having done a single thing that might have given him knowledge or feedback. His opinion is superficial and ignorant, usually just repeating whatever idle chatter the commentators used to fill the dead air, and they do that for hours sometimes. Not only is there nothing profound happening, there’s no lesson to learn. Nothing thoughtful or important occurs during a sporting event, a television show, or a mainstream movie. It’s junk food for your mind. It makes you sick, slovenly, dumb, and distracted. Hours pass that you could have spent doing something intelligent or interesting, but instead you watched a ball get tossed from one place to another, no different than the last hundred times. The result didn’t matter. The time was just killed. And the older you get, the more you notice that time doesn’t come back. That’s the part they don’t put on the highlight reel.

And that’s how it goes, I guess.