The enjoyment of drama is similar to my post on Architects in Hell, and is one of the main themes I took away from my partial read of “Games people play” by Eric Berne. I would say a fair amount of them actually revolve around filling the void of boredom, which is particularly common in our time. 1 Other reasons include: blaming someone, coming up with excuses for oneself, signalling some type of virtue without having to do difficult things, or finding some way to feel superior to someone else.
The whole nature of these kinds of games is that the enjoyment of drama can never be made explicit, because it would highlight the petty nature of its participants, and the clinging to said drama. This is why anyone who cannot read the room and joins onto the pretend game is quickly dismissed, such as when people partake in a cycle of complaining about their life, but someone cheerfully goes against it and says that they love their life.
1 Darren Allen has an entire series on boredom on his Substack which is worth checking out. If I had to explain to myself why boredom is so prevalent in the modern world, I would say that the system we live in is aligned with control, which includes control of people and what they do, but even control of experience, to the point that genuine curiosity at something happening is increasingly rare as people grow up from being children, who are notorious for being fascinated by everything. So control on the individual level is a sort of split of reality, because how can you control something you feel right at home in? And that split is a major component of boredom. Then, at a societal level, control obviously limits people’s freedom to provide for themselves, use their time as they want, work on genuinely meaningful things—as opposed to bullshit jobs designed to keep them in the system—and so on, which makes the split of experience even worse, since now people are channeled into avenues provided by the system, such as consumerism, vacations and the industry of entertainment, to relieve boredom, a symptom of the very same system which removed all sense of adventure from daily life. As is often the case now, the poison and the "cure" are given by the two hands of the same person.
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2025-01-30