Today we live in a world of excess, expediency, and streaming. Therefore, the media rabbit holes will keep pulling you further into an abyss. It is a bottomless pit of entertainment that has very little punctuation.
Commercial breaks used to be a form of forced punctuation. When you watched your favorite sitcom on TV, it was similar to having a three course dinner—appetizer, entree, dessert—in which you’d have to wait a little before your next dish was brought to you. Most mediums now are either without commercial breaks or the commercials that do exist can be skipped.
The problem with this phenomenon is that it’s conditioning us to have to constantly be passively entertained. Moreover, we lose the ability to experientially gage our time and space. Commercials created boundaries and checkpoints that protected us from getting swept away.
Books have their own form of commercial breaks. They are called chapters. Chapters create appropriate stopping points and opportunities for transitioning from one state into another. They are like off ramps on a highway. When you drive a long time on a highway with no off ramp, you become more easily disconnected from time and space. Netflix and YouTube are masters of eliminating off ramps. Just when you think you are exiting, the next piece of content begins playing.
No wonder we have trouble self-regulating our energy, thoughts, and attention. It is very difficult to self-regulate when we have gotten used to consuming information and entertainment in non punctuated ways. The very nature of hashtags are words next to one another without any punctuation. We are endlessly distracted and, at the same time, unable to come up for air. It is very paradoxical. Perhaps, it points to the fact that we aren’t wired to endlessly consume. And the absence of commercials tells us something about how commercials, as annoying and disruptive as they can be, actually protect us from the parts of ourselves that insatiably crave more.
