Esse est percipi
It’ll come as no great surprise that I’ve never read any of the world’s great philosophers. Plato, Nietzsche, Jung and Marx have all sadly passed me by (so far) and I fully concede that my own thoughts on life are more fag-packet than Freud, more vapid than Voltaire and more desperate than Descartes. Nonetheless, I do like it when an intelligent, perceptive thinker brings some of the more classical musings into the modern day. And so it was when The Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman used the observations of existentialist philosopher, Jean Paul Satre, to question whether or not we really do have to watch Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad.
Apparently, one of Satre’s most famous pronouncements was that the waiter at his favourite café actively chose to become a waiter but commits himself to the role with such verve, such panache, because he wants to persuade himself that he had no choice in doing so. His very being compels him to be a waiter. Satre believes the waiter convinces himself that he had no choice because the acceptance of the individual choice of being a waiter is worse than, er…being a waiter. If you get my drift.
Burkeman identified that binge-watching the latest unmissable water-cooler-moment series appears to be something essential to modern life in 2019, to the extent that it is no longer an individual’s decision as to watch it or not. You HAVE to watch it. Non-negotiable. Or rather you convince yourself you have to watch it. As with Satre’s waiter, the possibility of choice just doesn’t come into it. Now, admittedly, he knows he’s being a tad frivolous in that, in reality, not too many people felt truly obliged to watch GoT, but he does go on to state that many within modern of society are guilty of making this very-conscious choice wrt the-must-have digital technology.
We persuade ourselves that something is 100% necessary, a non-negotiable aspect of modern life – being party to the latest WhatsApp group, ‘liking’ without considering, proudly owning the new iPhone 10XS and instagramming your next selfie, automatically retweeting Trump’s latest tirade, responding to messages in the blink of an eye – and then work-out how to convince ourselves it’s all essential, as opposed to questioning the relevance of the act in the first place. Several of you will now have realised where this is going – I climb upon my high-horse and somewhat superciliously, arrogantly proclaim it’s all for nowt and explain how I have managed, by merely eschewing a smart phone and avoiding Facebook, to avoid the lemming-like rush to the dystopian future. But, and it’s a BIG but, the tricky bit is that some of those things are obligatory. Some are indeed non-negotiable.
I’m fortunate that through certain choices, or not as the case may have been, I don’t really dance to anyone else’s tune and I’m pretty much self-contained. Most people aren’t and that person’s situation may genuinely enforce them to be available 24/7, to respond immediately to an email request or to bend to another’s will. Or to wait tables they would rather not. Notwithstanding, and this was Mr Burkeman’s penny-dropping moment, the economic forces that constrain choice also want us to believe those choices are way more constrained than they really are. The stark reality of the situation is that whatever little choice you think you have, it’s almost certainly more than you believe. You’ve just got to believe in the choices you’re going to make, and make them.
Perhaps Aristotle was too busy updating his online profile when he told us that “we are what we repeatedly do” and Thomas Hobbes’ way off the money when he thoughtfully explained that “the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. It doesn’t have to be and the choice is yours, even if it’s the more difficult one.
There is an marvellous emblem tariff because of win. carlbeetham.com
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