How Drama Can Ruin Your Life
Or The Power of Selective Ignorance
‘Drama starts where logic ends’ – Ram Charan
A couple of weeks ago, I found myself engrossed in series of YouTube videos poking fun at the new Disney movie The Little Mermaid. How the CGI was terrible and the colours dull, how awful the new rap song was, how children were becoming restless during the 2 hour 15 minute run time, how Disney live remakes are pointless, and so on, and so on.
It wasn’t until I’d watched 4 of these videos, lasting about 25 minutes in total, that I questioned what exactly I was doing for a number of reasons:
1. I’ve never watched the original Little Mermaid and probably never will.
2. I’ve not got kids young enough to want to watch the live remake, so I won’t be watching that either.
3. I had a lot of more important things I could have been doing with my time, like running a business…
4. Checking in with myself, I actually felt worse than when I’d started watching the videos. I’d developed a brain fog where I was unaware of anything outside of my phone screen, just letting YouTube feed me the same content repackaged by other people as if I was incapacitated.
But I must admit, the videos were feeding a deep desire in me for drama, especially involving Disney. I used to enjoy watching Marvel and Star Wars movies and abhorred the slide of those franchises into mediocrity under Disney’s watch. Therefore, anything negative about Disney, no matter how unrelated to my interests, makes me interested.
Disney’s recent share price fall is the car crash and I’ve been one of the rubberneckers.
Over the last year, I’d found my YouTube feed getting more and more filled with negativity. Whether it was about movies, TV shows, politics, celebrities or imminent disasters, I had to wade through a shit-pipe of derision, delirium and diatribe before I could find anything mentally challenging.
But one common factor linked all of those videos – drama.
A recent study shows that, even if you mark a YouTube video as ‘Disliked’, their algorithm will still send you more of the same. YouTube wants viewers to stay on the platform as long as possible, so as long as you’re watching content, it doesn’t matter whether you actually like that content or not. You may even decide to click ‘Like’ because the person told you to at the end of the video, even if you felt worse after watching it.
And anything involving drama has a magnetic pull on us, whether it’s gossiping about the neighbours or about celebrities that we’ll never meet. News outlets prioritise dramatic content, which is mainly negative, over positive stories because we evolved over time to be attentive to anything negative which may risk our survival.
But we still get a small amount of pleasure out of hearing scandalous, dramatic or negative news. Michael Caine said in The Dark Knight: “Some men just want to watch the world burn” but he’s really talking about something that’s in all of us.
Think about the amount of time you’ve spent watching, reading or listening to the following:
1. The Will Smith slap
2. The Johnny Depp / Amber Heard trial
3. Harry and Meghan
Maybe it’s a few hours of your time in total, but for some people this amounts to days or even weeks absorbing or engaging with content involving the above.
If you tot up the time spent by everyone around the world caught up in the drama these 5 selfish1 people have caused, we’re talking billions of hours that could have been better spent helping humanity instead of impeding it. And I haven’t even mentioned the Kardashians. Watch the movie Idiocracy for an idea of where we could be headed.
This is where Selective Ignorance2 comes in. Choose to be selectively ignorant about certain things that don’t do you any good, whether that’s gossip, negative news reports or social media3. Instead of being controlled by FOMO (the Fear of Missing Out), embrace JOMO (the Joy of Missing Out).
I recalled seeing the coach/author Marie Forleo earlier this year when she ran through an exercise defining what you won’t do, to help build your character.
Whenever you find yourself engaging in behaviours that harm, rather than help you, say: ‘I don’t do ______’ and make it part of your character.
So, I decided that I don’t do drama.
It’s early days, but I’ve been able to stay off YouTube completely and limit my daily time on social media to a few minutes. My daily phone usage has dropped by 50% as I’m no longer tempted to go down rabbit holes, and I’ve generally felt more positive and productive. Each time I’ve thought about watching or reading content fuelled by drama, I just remind myself that I don’t do it and move onto something more beneficial.
To be clear, I’m not saying don’t watch drama shows on TV for entertainment now and then, especially quality ones like Line of Duty or Breaking Bad, but be aware when something has been engineered to engage your monkey brain to distract you and possibly make money from your attention without giving something useful back in return.
What kinds of drama do you find yourself regularly engaged in? Or how would you complete ‘I don’t do ________?’ Let me know in the comments.
Independent of whether or not you support Johnny Depp, it was his decision to televise the trial, which went on to generate years of time-sapping online content through clips, memes and commentary.
Here's a good summary of Selective Ignorance - https://nesslabs.com/selective-ignorance
This is another area where I still need to cut back on. I use Facebook mainly to keep up to date with what friends and family are doing, but end up doomscrolling through all sorts of posts from people I've never met, or ads for things I don't need.
Great reminder Phil! I choose to be ignorant of “left vs. right” / “liberal vs. conservative” news.