Stress in my Entertainment
‘Stress’ is, I guess, a relative term. I feel like I have a pretty stressful life, with a high pressure job, a house and kids to take care of. But, I also don’t worry about where my next meal is coming from or if a tiger is going to stalk out of the jungle and eat me in the middle of the night.
But, we feel what we feel. So whether I have any right to be stressed does not affect whether or not I am stressed. And I am. So being in a state of more or less stress all the time, I don’t tend to want stress in my entertainment.
And honestly? I think I’m the only one.
I am sympathetically hypochondriacal enough to worry about every little cough and blemish on my loved ones. A brief pain in your knee? Obviously knee cancer. Have it checked.
Therefore, the last thing I need in recreational time is a medical show where people die of things I hadn’t thought you could die of before.
As a trial attorney whose success or failure can sometimes result in someone seeing – or not – their children, I get shots of adrenaline at work. I do not need to dangle from a bungee cord off a bridge, hoping that the 25-year-old stoner who buckled me in the harness got all the straps right.[1]
Don’t get me started on blood and gore. Why watching someone get disemboweled is what someone wants to do with their free time is beyond me. Even a ‘cleaner’ gunshot wound is a bit much for my tastes. I can’t quit thinking about the fear in the person facing the gun, not to mention the spouses and children and parents of the dead guy who now have to have a funeral.
Empathy can be a real bitch.
I prefer low-stakes entertainment. Make me laugh, not wince. Let me come out of it with something I’ve made, even if it’s just a good memory. Friendly competition like bowling when we all know we stink and can cheer on each other’s strikes.[2] Experience adventures like sightseeing or wine tastings.
Judging from the talk around the water cooler and water coolers everywhere, even virtual ones like social media, I’m in a small minority in this opinion. I guess I’m extra-sensitive to adrenaline and I don’t especially like the way it makes me feel. Everyone else likes watching people get killed in creative ways on television. A beheading? Bring it on! Horrific car wrecks along the route of a chase with bullets flying? Oh yeah. Murder in cold blood? Ooh! A mystery!
So, put that in the column of the myriad of ways that I’m not like everyone else. Am I cowardly? Wimpy? A big baby? Perhaps. But, like Popeye says, I yam what I yam. And I yam a person who prefers laughing to cringing.
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[1] My lawyer tells me that here I should state on the record that I KNOW not all 25-year-olds are not stoners, nor are all, or even most bungee-jump operators. Most of them are just entrepreneurial people trying to work for a living. That said, I can totally see me going head first into the rocks below and some guy looking over the cliff edge and saying a meaningful, “duuuuuuuuuude.”
[2] Or, in my case, non-gutterballs.
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