DDB made a comment the other day that I’ve been thinking about. In my last post, I said something about how I’d spent ~150 hours watching Lost, and DDB said something about how my comment had made him re-evaluate how he’s spending his time. I think the idea was that the notion of spending 150 hours watching tv was pretty alarming. And I agree — all else equal, it is.
What’s remarkable, though, is that I don’t regret spending all that time, not even a little bit. Watching Lost was a thoroughly worthwhile pursuit, which raises the question about what a ‘worthwhile pursuit’ actually means. What about the other stuff that I do? I spend at least ten hours a week in cafes, thinking about stuff; maybe five hours a week at the gym. A lot of working, some time cooking and cleaning, going to meetings, reading papers, seeing friends, reading the Economist, watching basketball …
What do I have to show for all of that? What does anyone have to show for anything, ever? When’s the time well spent? You could spend forever trying to systematize the answer to that question, and I don’t have forever. So I’ll just give my preliminary results:
I think that any undertaking that makes you understand the world better is worth doing. From watching Lost I understand more about certain kinds of storytelling; what works, what doesn’t. It was, in many ways, a groundbreaking display of serial narrative. If you’re interested in the craft of narrative, then it’s like taking a class. It’s like watching a master carpentar building a bigger, more glorious house than any you’d seen before. (Nevermind that he fucked it up in the end.)
In a fuzzier way, though, Lost gave me what good stories always give you: a peephole into another reality, into other peoples’ lives. And it doesn’t matter that the ‘people’ were fictional and their ‘lives’ implausible and fantastic. Good drama turns all the knobs turned to 11, and as such throws aspects of the human condition into stark relief, where details that might otherwise have been hidden jump out at you. The best drama, the best writing, the best art is sufficiently rich that the pretend reality maps onto the real reality in some profound way. This is why Lost is worthwhile; this is why Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” has something to say to us, even though nobody in the real world ever turns into a giant bug. And so on.
You know what isn’t worthwhile, though? Most of the time I spend screwing around on the internet. Arguing with people, to no purpose. Researching trivialities. I’ve spent more time, by far, preparing to do things, or trying to figure out the optimal way to do them, than actually doing anything. More time writing about writing than writing. Etc. That’s wasted time, and I want to do better.