By Isaac Withers
When I was in my first year of university, I did a lot of TV watching. But I had some good
reasons to. Firstly, I had a lot of free time on my hands, and
everyone I knew seemed to be telling me about a good show I ‘had to watch’. And
they weren’t entirely wrong, we’re still in what’s being called a ‘golden age’
for TV shows, with big Hollywood actors signing up for recurring TV roles instead of movies (think Kevin
Spacey House of Cards, or Matthew McConaughey
in True Detective who arguably started the
trend).
So I
got in deep. Occasionally two deep. I remember watching the
first three Game of Thrones seasons
in three weeks, I got really into Daredevil
and Peaky Blinders, and I got through
True Detective’s first season in just
three days. Which was rough. And yet, that last one is still kind of a fond memory if a hazy one. Sitting in a lecture sleep deprived but proud of my accomplishment and having
enjoyed the indulgence of going all out on a show.
That habit has become how this generation watches TV: when we want, and however much we want. It’s
kind of the whole basis of the extremely popular Netflix streaming service. And
yet, as convenient and fun as that whole set up is, bingeing is also jokingly
know for its withdrawal symptoms, reaching the end and craving more episodes,
or filling that void with the next series. This has become a bit of a brag too,
one I made in the past, there’s a pride to conquering a whole show
fast, and moving to the next. And the joke only really works because everyone knows
it’s unhealthy and no one really claims otherwise. Heck, it's got a whole culture of internet memes built around it.
Anyway, about two weeks ago, a
guest speaker came from the Birmingham Oratory to our Uni chaplaincy to give a
talk about Lent and to my surprise, he brought up this phenomenon in modern TV
consumption, and talked at length about Netflix. But he set the discussion of
bingeing right up against the practise of fasting, and it was such a stark comparison.
I know that when I’ve fasted from
food for faith reasons (nowhere near as often as I’ve binged watched TV), it's made me
appreciate food a lot more. On fast days I can look at a salad and there’ll be
fireworks going off in my brain (and salads are just leaves in a bowl…). That
feeling of appreciation is so far the opposite of the binge, just firing
through something I should be valuing more slowly but can’t help. I know that
on a deeper level, being in control of my habits makes me just feel better about myself, in a way that the easy, shared jokes about episode withdrawals never did.
So I haven’t really binged a show
since second year, but there’s still something that interests me about how it
became ok- no, cool, for me to do that. I think the heart of it is the
discussion of what freedom is.
In my first year, I also really
found it hard to just go to sleep at a reasonable time, mainly because there
was no one telling me to. Something my parents
had had control of for most of my life, I now had the decision on. And so I
made the opposite decision, and it cost me.
I missed a fair few of my lectures, and knowing I’d had no good reason to, I’d
feel down about that, and then my day would feel a bit rubbish, and my body
clock would be way out, so I couldn’t help but repeat the pattern. It was how I was
choosing to express that freedom, and it sucked.
Fundamentally, I think bingeing
is socially accepted now, because we really don’t like to be told what
to do, to be controlled, we like personal autonomy. And there’s so many areas where this freedom can go
wrong, think the hours spent on social media by all of us, the endless funny
videos on YouTube and even the massive statistics on visits to porn sites everyday. It’s socially acceptable to give however much time we want to all of these
things, because it's our choice to. But we might need to start a new movement to argue for the
opposite: fasting, the anti-binge movement.
That’s surely what Lent is, and
reaching the end of those 40 days having had freedom from something that once dictated
our hours to us always feels better on a deep human level, than the satisfaction of the next episode. What’s ironic is that these areas where we
lose control and abandon to the binge, can so quickly start to feel like they
are removing our freedom to not return to them. One of the readings at Mass at
the beginning of this Lent was this.
'No one can serve two
masters.
Either you will hate the one and love the other,
or you will be
devoted to the one and despise the other.
You cannot serve both God and money.’'
Matthew 6:24
As soon as I heard that, I knew
exactly what I had to give up for Lent (it wasn’t money), but the idea of two masters immediately made me aware of what I was spending too much time on
unhealthily, and I knew it was obstructing me from living my faith well.
However, in the discussion of
bingeing and fasting, we can’t forget feasting. That’s like leaving out the
ghost of Christmas Present, and he’s the fun one of the three. We’re not supposed to be down
about fasting because as well as it being freeing, this whole Lent thing started
with pancakes and the feast of Easter is on the horizon. We as Catholics seem
to know what we’re doing when it comes to feasting, we just maybe need to
reclaim fasting a lot more. Heck, even Jesus was criticised for not fasting
enough (Matthew 11:19), but he was also very clear that fasting should not look
like a drag.
'When you fast, do not look sombre
as the hypocrites do,
for they disfigure their faces to show others they are
fasting.
Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.'
Matthew 6:16
But just imagine if not only was
fasting not sombre, but one day as cool as bingeing is right now. That’s the
kind of cultural shift we need.
Anyway, for now, enjoy the fast, and stay free.
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