I watch a healthy amount of what most would call shitty TV. A lot of people feel embarrassed about this. Just as many people flaunt their ignorance about bad TV as though it were some kind of merit badge. “What is a Kardashian?” they ask. “There’s really a show where a lady brushes her teeth with urine? You actually wasted 22 minutes of your life watching that?”
Yes, I did. And I am not ashamed of that.
I used to tell people it was because I spent the day at my intellectual profession and “zoning out’ is a crucial state for your brain to be in. I know that there are better ways to achieve the “health benefits” of a Jersey Shore marathon like… yoga or meditating- but does anyone really feel as relaxed as they do after they get off the couch following three Law and Order: SVU episodes in a row?
Another way to think about watching shitty TV is like it is a story problem in math. If you watch the news or “intellectual” TV they give you a bunch of information and tell you how you should think about it. When you watch The Real World and see MTV beep out the word “tampon” it might get you thinking about feminism and why we’re so uncomfortable with the actual name of a hygiene product that we’re housing it with “shit” and “fuck” and “cunt.”
When you watch reality TV or scripted dramas you are watching people live their lives without commentary. You have conversations with your friends about whether it was totally unethical of Bachelor Ben to go skinny dipping with one of his ladies in waiting. This stretches your critical thinking muscle a lot more than 60 minutes does.
The thing is, people don’t really value critical thinking that much, they value facts. This is why “news junkies” read the paper and watch MSNBC so that they can participate in conversations about things that happened and pepper the conversation with details and related stories. This is fine, I’m sure there’s a great philosophical argument out there for being up on the world but I value the ability to process all those facts more than knowing the ‘right’ ones.
Blame it on the bucket list or any number of pinterest-y quotes about how awful it is to have things in your life that you regret not doing. It’s so much easier to make a mistake, hit the ground, and move on than it is to wonder how differently (better?) your life could have been had you gone option B. Fear of missing out (FOMO) is a ubiquitous 20something disease.
Jeremy Bentham developed an awesome decision making tool called hedonic calculus. Basically you just rate every potential course of action according to a static set of conditions:
- the intensity of happiness it will bring you
- the duration of the happiness
- the certainty or uncertainty that the action will make you happy
- whether the gratification will be immediate or delayed
- fecundity
- whether the action will have negative consequences
- how many people will it bring happiness to?
I’m not trying to tell Jeremy how to philosophize but it really seems like this algorithm needs an eighth consideration: whether the absence of the action will induce FOMO. You could go through this whole list and determine that an action doesn’t sound like a really great investment. Things like moving to Brooklyn because you really want to make it as a writer, switching careers or getting back together with an ex have actually a negative guarantee of happiness. They are highly risky situations in which it’s realistic that you may end up broke, unhappy and living with your parents.
Adding potential for FOMO to Bentham’s hedonic calculus acknowledge that learning life lessons or benefiting from uncalculated risks are just as valuable than a safe bet. We have more options than people in Bentham’s time did. We also live longer and know that well have a long time to stew about a missed opportunity when we’re kept artificially alive in a nursing home. Act accordingly.
onlymidnight asked: My university is losing funding for the Philosophy department...I haven't been following very well so I'm not sure if you're philosophy majors per se but what would be your best argument for why Philosophy is necessary to education? I think your humour might help as I feel I have none. Plus you said you were bored/drunk I think... exciting times.
I routinely edit people’s writings for many different reasons. It is extremely different to edit the writing of a philosophy major than any other person because philosophers learn how to think critically, make a good argument and write clearly. Everyone else sort of writes in jumbles without ever identifying why they are even bothering to write in the first place. Think of how many professions you could enter into and excel at if you knew how to do these three things well.
I work in marketing and the content of my philosophy degree (ex: the definition of phenomenology) is not at all helpful to my work, but the form (ex: learning how to convey a point strongly) is the reason I am good at what I do.
In philosophy you’re supposed to use arguments to get to the truth. Ideally you and another bro with a different opinion go back and forth lobbing criticisms at the other person’s point of view. There isn’t an end point because philosophers never stop talking. There’s always something else to be critiqued, another point to mention, and another scenario to consider.
From outside, it might appear that the “point” of philosophy is to get somewhere, to arrive at the destination of wisdom. Spoiler alert: this never happens. This isn’t something philosophy promises from the beginning.
I think philosophy is more internally focused than this. Philosophy has strengths and weaknesses- it’s really great at helping you think about your beliefs and actions but it really sucks at delivering a capital a Answer to what you should be doing, thinking or feeling. What I mean is that you should read philosophy and think about philosophy and talk to people about philosophy insofar as it helps you think about whatever is important to you.
The reason that philosophy acts more like a mirror than a vehicle is that we’re not logic-based beings. As unpopular as this opinion is, we’re ruled a lot more by feelings and emotions than reason. We’re rooted to the things we care about in this life, no matter how stupid they are. So, for all your dinner table arguments with your parents about political philosophy the determining factor when you get to the voting booth is your feelings and experience- even if your dad has argued a more convincing case than you have.
So, philosophy can help you determine how you feel about something by asking reason-based questions. It can shed light on your own biases, but there’s got to be a visceral connection as well. It can lead you to water, but it can’t make you drink. An experience can change your mind about something you firmly believe, a relationship with someone who believes differently than you can do that, earnest self exploration can do it, but an argument can’t.
When is it going to be okay to talk about the limitations of reason? We’re people, not equations. Believing in something is a complicated and layered course of action that we steer with all parts of ourselves. Is it funny that marketers understand this but philosophers don’t?
Vintage PhiLOLZophy post today:
For those of you who aren’t familiar, Blaise Pascal was this philosopher who is mostly remembered for his ‘argument’ that you should believe in god. Basically he narrows the issue to four options, explains the potential outcomes of each option, and then says that if you were a betting man (person, ugh) that you would choose to believe in god. Kind of feels like Pascal thinks he’s Liz Lemon and I’m Jack Donaghy and he’s getting me to hire a shitty person by surrounding them with three even shittier people. But I digress.
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Epistemology is the study of knowledge. How do we know things? Can we know things? Spoiler alert: you’ve got to have a really high bullshit threshold to read anything in this field. People apply epistemology to the most boring kinds of situations. Do I exist? Um, yeah duh or else um no, duh but either way you won’t cease thinking, which is enough of existing to matter as we learned from Descartes.
What I especially dislike about epistemology is that we talk about it as if we have any kind of control over what we believe to be true (know). Think about your last breakup. You spent weeks trying to “move on.” If we had doxastic voluntarism- authority over to pick and choose what we believed- we wouldn’t have to keep repeating “I’m better off without him.” You would accept the facts and move on because you have allowed yourself (or been allowed) to believe that is the best course.
I think one of the most interesting (though not necessarily factual) parts of the Bible is the story about Paul. His name was Saul at first and he persecuted Christians but then one day he was riding his horse around and he had this sudden conversion experience and he changed his name and became one. To me, this is a perfect example of how epistemology works. It’s out of our control.
On the other side, think about people who are religious, who question their faith or abandon it entirely. Surely they didn’t arrive at that unwelcome destination by sheer force of will. Religious leaders sometimes have doubts, proving that just because you want to “have faith” in something doesn’t mean that you will.
I think the evangelists have it wrong. I think will is entirely irrelevant. If you’re an especially frightened person you can choose to surround yourself with reassurance, sure. You can stack the deck so that a change in thinking will be extremely unlikely. You can read apologetic texts, listen to Christian radio, immerse yourself completely in Evangelical culture. This is a lifestyle in which it’s unlikely you’ll encounter any bumps in the road that might cause you to question your beliefs. The point is that your beliefs are formed by your socio-political place in the world and the family you were born into and are unlikely to be changed because someone tells you “jesus saves” in passing.
The point is to stop thinking about beliefs as something to be proud of. You don’t have faith in something, it is chosen for you. You probably didn’t even have anything to do with it. Was Jim Carey on The Truman Show proud that he believed his life was normal? When he was introduced to the truth could he have chosen to actually reject that new belief that it was a hoax and revert to his earlier worldview? Absolutely not.
When it comes to your worldview you are a product, not a producer. Stop taking credit for happenstance.
In honor of International Women’s Day we’ll get real for a sec and pay homage to a few people who have been really meaningful to us:
1) Our Moms. Cliche, but seriously our mom’s are amazing. My mom divorced my dad-bro when I was a lil baby and I grew up thinking that anything I wanted to do in life I could just do. Men were an afterthought. My mom was a firefighter, an EMT in rescue helicopters, and boss-bitch of all the drunks in the ER. How cool is that? Our other mom (we want them to be best friends) is very literally the nicest woman you will ever meet. I picked her up once when she was rear ended and I received a hand written thank-you note in the mail the next day. She is a diabetic who makes brownies because she has four kids and a husband who like them and puts the needs of literally every person she has ever met in front of her own. Thanks moms!
2) Sara Shady. This was our Feminist Philosophy professor. At a small college it wouldn’t have been uncommon to not have any female professors at all, so her presence as one of the figureheads of the department made me feel really comfortable. I always felt a lil dumb and like I was faking it because all the bros in my classes were so arrogant. One day she said that when she was in grad school she felt like one day someone was going to tap her on the shoulder and tell her she didn’t belong there. I was like GET OUT OF MY HEAD LADY. But seriously, I had no idea that the way I felt was incredibly common and this little ounce of vulnerability went a long way.
3. Susan Bordo. This is a feminist philosopher who wrote a book called Unbearable weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. If you want to know the thought process of being a woman, you should pick this book up. It explained to me all of the issues I have with my appearance, how they came to be, and why it’s a feminist issue. Her books are academic but she writes for people, not philosophy journals. I think she was exploring issues of the body through philosophy because she wanted to understand them, so that we can all investigate the root causes and do something about it. This isn’t ineffectual analytic philosophy, she’s not debating whether or not she exists. This is important and relevant and grounded in her own intellectual passions.
4. Janice Moulton. Janice Moulton invented the critique against the adversary method. This means she said “hey, arguing back and forth might not be the most effective way to find out if something is true or not.” We’ve blogged extensively about why this is a really important concept.
5. Anne Sexton. It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that we’re kind of #dark bitches sometimes. As a girl your supposed to be happy and nice and not tell guys you have deep emotional issues. Anne is like I’m here, I’m dark, whatever! She was writing confessional poetry about being depressed, jealous, horny, and just about anything else without a hint of embarrassment. Reading her poems may have been our little dark and twisty version of Free to Be You and Me.
Is there a god?
How does the answer to this question directly impact your life? Foucault talks about being imprisoned in a jail where the guards can watch your every move, but they are hidden so you are never sure if you are being watched or not. The prisoners here may follow the rules because of the Panopticon, because they are trapped by the inability to do bad things in private. On the other end of the spectrum Plato writes about a special ring you could wear that would make you completely invisible. The point of this story is to ask aloud whether anyone is so virtuous that they could resist the temptation to be immoral when the risk of getting caught is removed.
I think there is an underlying element in asking this question in which people just want to know if they need to have integrity or not.
Why do bad things happen to good people?
Bad things happen to good people because nature is impersonal. The rain falls on us all.
Interesting though, is that nature is not more chaotic. Physical actions have equal and opposite reactions (cf: Newton) but the moral or ethical value of your actions does not have a predictible reaction. Where in one case we could be sympathetic to an argument for an intelligent design of our world becomes bewildering. Is this an Aristetellian design? Are physical actions governed because they are more important?
What is the point of life?
There is no answer to this question that makes sense to people from first tier country that can also be adopted by people from second tier countries. Conclusion: life is absurd.
Why is life so hard?
Why do Josh Schwartz shows constantly jump the shark? Because without conflict there is no plot development. Your life conflict is probably made up. Like, what percent of your problems would you still have if you had to find food and water everyday instead of hating your entry level job and trying to get a girl’s attention? You have to have some kind of conflict in your life.
What happens after you die?
You probably get to sleep. I’m not sure. See question 1.
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You should like us and ask us really inappropriate questions 247. K?
