The Age of Living Vicariously

The most important television event of last year and therefore one of the most important events, period, was the passing of “Cheers” into eternal rerun. This most popular show of the Reagan-Bush years combined all the paradoxes of the TV age.

On the one hand, it played to the deep, ever-growing yearning for “a place where everybody always knows your name and they’re always glad you came.” On the other hand, it encouraged us to experience that world entirely secondhand. To sit in a living room and look at a bar. And why? Because the bar in “Cheers” offers all the virtues of premasticated living -- no chance that someone will bore or offend or reject you. That it offers none of the joys, either -- no chance that someone will befriend or seduce or engage you -- is the great trade-off of our moment. Absolute predictability (for “Cheers” is essentially the same, one night to the next) at the cost of experience, of event, of your life.

This substitution of secondhand experience for actual living may at first seem to be without environmental consequence -- or even, in the calculations of the overly practical, beneficial, since it takes less energy to run a picture tube than it would to get you to a bar.

At second look, however, I think that the replacement of your own reality with someone else’s mass-produced version is at the very heart of our Western environmental cataclysm, a cataclysm driven most of all by our endless materialism. We need greater resource efficiency, we need population to be brought under control, but in the West the demon we must exorcise is the one that says: “Hey, I would like the Thighmaster-Buick-4,000-square-foot-house-master-of-the-pan-pipes-Bigfoot-pizza.”

What is materialism? It is, beyond the point of basic sufficiency and comfort, nothing more than the search for fulfillment in all the wrong places. Americans in the mid-1980’s spent more hours shopping than their counterparts in the then-Soviet Union, bread lines notwithstanding. The very fact that it is an endless search, that no possession satisfies more than momentarily, proves that it is not about the needs in our lives but the needs in our souls.

But there is more here than merely looking in the wrong places. It is not as if it’s by accident that we have wandered into the malls. The TV, and the consumer society it anchors, constantly teach us not to look to the simple, the easy, the obvious sources of pleasure. They by their nature deceive us about what we like: passive, not active; bought, not made. Until we no longer respond to our instincts.

Even the nature programs, glorious in their carnivorous detail, make us less, not more, likely to enjoy the natural world as it actually exists. Why spend the afternoon in the woodlot by your home, caught up in the rhythms and quiet intricacies of the outdoors, if your idea of “nature” has been conditioned by “Wild Kingdom”? You wander the forest path and wonder: Where are all the large ungulates and giant cats who are supposed to be alternately mating and killing each other?

Most of the people who think much about the effects of TV on our culture eventually throw up their hands. They may toss out their own set, but they see no way that our culture will ever be freed of its addiction, especially now that 500-channel cable looms. The future appears to be high-definition, digital and bleak: a civilization lolling on the couch while the world outside heats up, simplifies, deteriorates.

If there is room for hope -- and on many days I am as pessimistic as any other fin-de-siecle kind of guy -- then it lies in the one strange fact about our consumer society. For all its power, for all its domination of our lives, it has not succeeded in making us very happy. There is a vague but substantial longing in many of us -- there is that voice that appears halfway through a night of prime time, maybe around the second commercial break of “Golden Girls,” the voice that says, “I really could be doing something more interesting than this. More fun. More real.” TV does its best to drown out the voice, enticing us with ever flashier, ever more titillating visions. “Stay in your seat, dammit -- we have transvestites! Actual Crips who have killed people!” But still that dim sense that there must be something more lingers.

Researchers at the University of Chicago figured out a way to correlate people’s activities with their moods throughout an average week. What they found was that their subjects got more pleasure from almost anything (talking to their sister on the phone, playing volleyball at the Y) than they did from the tube. Does anyone get up from a night of viewing feeling refreshed, looking forward to the next night so they can do it all again?

So why do we watch? Why do we submerge ourselves in a material culture that brings us little pleasure and less fulfillment? Because, probably, it’s the first risk-free environment humans have yet conjured. We can use it to control our emotions like we can use the thermostat on the wall to control the climate in our houses. Any time we want to balance our mood we know how to do it, which shows to watch.

How might this nearly perfect feedback loop be broken? Not by telling people it’s bad for the environment, that they’ve enmeshed themselves in a matrix that inevitably leads to overconsumption and more carbon dioxide and general horror. Generally speaking, people are less responsive to general horror than to General Motors. The only way to subvert people any more is to have more fun than they do. To walk in the woods, to brew beer, to volunteer in a homeless shelter, to act in a play, to do anything real that escapes the stifling, cynical world of TV and the mall. The world feels threatened by such folk -- by people doing what the rest of the population dimly knows somewhere deep down they would like to do too.

Perhaps the pessimists are right, and the TV age has lasted too long, trapped too many generations. Perhaps the attraction of the real can’t overcome the fear of risk. And if it doesn’t -- if “Geraldo” is too powerful, as well as Maury Povich, and Pat Robertson, and the Home Shopping Network, and “Northern Exposure,” and David Letterman, and “Seinfeld,” and all the rest -- then there is the consolation that at least you can learn to live differently. The world may not be saved, but your life will. And that’s something, anyway.