The hell does that have to do with anything I wrote? Are you quoting the wrong person? Pure escapism fuel does not make people happy. In the same way that if you're sad and shoot heroin, it's not actually helping you. It can be incredibly fun (Lord knows, it's fucking great) ... but at best it's a temporary stop gap.Lil devils x said:Actually it is Stress, not " escapism" ( which is actually a means to provide stress relief) that is bad for one's health.
https://www.healthline.com/health/stress/effects-on-body#1
Of course people should not ignore their problems, but finding more means to reduce stress is a good thing, not bad. Most people do not have the luxury of having too much happiness or laughter in their lives and could use more.
Art is not heroin. It can't just be treated as such. Creating a layered media form isa part of the artistic process. Everything from tv shows to gallery exhibits. There's aplace for simply scintillating the senses, but ultimately it's unhealthy when it comes at the cost of merely distracting the nature of sapience.
As an example ... The Big Bang Theory ... that fucking frightens me. That people are just looking for a neurological hit of endorphins through a Pavlovian-style laugh track. Actually watch the show with the laugh track removed, and these people and the way they are delivered become the least funny, least desirable people to ever be stuck with ... and millions of people invite them into their homes and mindlessly consume them....
Quite literally because a laugh track tells people; "No seriously, these guys are actually funny."
And you think that's okay...? Things like TBBT and its popularity make me frightened of other people. Like just how awful human behaviour can they display, just add a laugh track, and suddenly people are throwing hundreds of millios of dollars at it and calling it 'comedy'.
Then I remember how during the Rape of Nanking, Japanese newspapers themselves used to publicze the results of just how many Chinese civilians various officers could behead as if it was a sporting past time. Reporting it as they would cricket scores. So much of the evidence for the East Asian tribunals for war crimes come for Japanese newspaper materials reporting on it as if it were so banal an event.
Doesn't detract from the idea that as a child, these officers were inculcated in a culture of mindless consumption of propaganda. As I was saying before ... how we consume media is kind of fucking important ... Artists and writers should recognize that burden and create more meaningful engagements with human thought rather than just producing endorphin hits of pure narration.
Because it is provably psychologically damaging.
I wrote a somewhat serious non-serious post recently about how 'Kawaii Culture' was started as basically a way of the Japanese government to coddle its own people and never really internalize their defeat or the actual horrors of warcrimes in the postwar period. As well as create a protracted image of a 'harmless Japan' to the Western world, lowering antipathies to Japanese war criminals like Prince Asaka who was still very much breathing when arguably he shouldn't have been and deserved to be hanged for war crimes ... all for the sake of Cold War sympathies and prosecuting a wider cultural conflict against the communists on mainland Asia.
Now we can discuss whether such persistent animosities to Japan itself was merited (I don't) ... but at the same time it's a bit hard to justify that part and parcel of that propaganda and manufactured culture consumption effort by Japan and the U.S. doesn't have deeply concerning aspects to it that are still relevant today. Like ... even now politicians can't give a formal apology for warcrimes without immediately retracting it.
They entirely ixnay it from their history books.
When I was staying there they moe-ified military propaganda created jointly by the JSDF and anime studios...
Why? Because at the time I was there there was a burning discussion of greater mobilization of its industry and military to be able to enter foreign engagements. Moe-ifying their military was effectively combining the built up techniques of promoting a harmless image that worked overseas, and also further distancing and coddling its own people about a past whose shadows are still in living memory.
Once again, mindless consumption of media can compromise our very morality and our interpretation of the past, and compromise truly internalizing the weight of history and the values we place on human life itself.
And once again ... all of this can be deeply psychologically damaging. And don't take my word for it... there's no shortage of Japanese sociologists and psychologists writing articles about the effects this has had on their political dynamics and the effects it has on truly piecing together a social environment that once was built on a 'pride of belonging' and how the Pacific War, and every propaganda attempt made yo curcumvent it, is creating a hole in their sense of belonging someplace.
How the 'culture of cute' on a manufactured scale and exposure, whether adults consume it or not (less than 20% of Japanese adults actually know much about their anime industry and what its producing concurrently) is damaging people, creating social isolation, and infantalizing adults, and creating neuroses concerning youth and beauty *in a country about to face a full blown aging crisis that can't afford such unhealthy fixations* ...
Hell, it even bleeds into its architectural and living or built environment conditions. You've probably heard the expression that 'Tokyo is a bit shitty in the rain' ... during the Monsoon period it makes you fucking depressed. Because during the drier periods every colour and so many pieces of niche apparel wear serves to inject a manufactured sense of coddling your urban travels and travails of living and working there.
In the rain, much of that disappears in a sea of umbrellas and waterproofed coats ...
How we consume media needs human thought in the end. Otherwise you create nothing but a dance with longterm depression by something as innocuous as rain.