Before spring break, I attended a lecture on materialism given by psychology Professor Richard Ryan. He rhetorically asked, “if you knew you had just one week left to live, would you really spend it watching television?”
Mulling over maudlin movie sequences of my last days on earth where I climb mountains, paint pictures and penetrate all the mysteries that are women, it struck me on the long car ride back to campus, “Yeah, maybe I would just watch TV, and what of it? Especially if that week featured NCAA tournament play.”
I think philosopher and dignified Roman Marcus Aurelius would have agreed. Proving my notion isn’t all farcical, in Book Four of his Meditations, Aurelius supposes “that a god announced that you were going to die tomorrow or ‘the day after.'”
Unless you were a complete coward, you wouldn’t kick up a fuss about which day it was – what difference could it make? Recognize that the difference between years from now and tomorrow is just as small. Why fuss over death and deviate from what you would do normally?
For a lot of Americans, staying home in the ensuing weeks of March Madness, that means a big ol’ ham sandwich and a TV set. A sandwich and 11 hours of white knuckle basketball games is probably one of the most pleasurable and fulfilling experiences in their short – ordinarily badly programmed – TV-filled lives.
Is this a sad commentary on society or on life? Ought it to be? Heck, no. Watching the games over break made me realize that you can buy happiness with a satellite dish, and that it’s preferable to gallivanting in frosty weather to scalp tickets for less comfortable seats. I see this as a metaphor for life – one that will become very evident in classes that professors make lecture notes available online.
Ellis can be reached at Wellis@campustimes.org.
