Is Netflix Making Our Lives Meaningless?

In today's post, we'll be exploring the presence of nihilism within everyday life.

Nihilism is something that many people think they understand, but most often don’t.

It’s a word that some are afraid of, but in reality, a lot of us simply don’t fully grasp what it means. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be scared of nihilism - I’m just highlighting the fact that we should all try to be educated in the nature of our fears.

I read a really good book recently.

It’s titled “Nihilism” and is written by Nolen Gertz. I have to admit, before reading this book, I definitely fell into the “scared of nihilism but don’t understand what it is” categorization of people. In today’s post, which was inspired by the book, I will be outlining how nihilism, including nihilistic activities and behaviours, is more common within our lives than we typically realize. In other words, most of us are probably more nihilistic than we tend to think. I’ll be drawing on some ideas brought forward by Nolen Gertz throughout this post. I’ll also end off with a quick commentary on what my personal “take away” from nihilism is and what I think we can learn from it.

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Nihilism

To begin, I think it would be helpful to define nihilism. Now, I must preface the definition by mentioning the fact that nihilism can be defined in a variety of ways. As is the case with many philosophical terms, they can mean different things to different people. A common thread within most definitions of nihilism seems to be the following; the belief that life is inherently meaningless. So, for the sake of this essay, let’s use that definition.

Viewing a nihilist as someone who believes that life is inherently meaningless can lead to nihilism being dramatized within our imagination. We picture a negative person, someone walking down the street with a rain cloud over their heads. It’s easy to synthesize a stereotypical picture of what a nihilist may look like, but what if I were to tell you that we all engage in nihilistic behaviour on a daily basis? Or that we embrace nihilism all the time within our daily lives? This is highlighted in Gertz’s book, and I’ll get into this argument in a second.

Personally, I think nihilism has less to do with the stereotypical picture we create in our heads, and more to do with escapism. It could be argued that escapism enables nihilism. I think we engage in forms of escapism on a daily basis without even realizing it, and we do this to get away from a variety of things. I’ll also expand upon this idea below.

In his book, Gertz outlines a variety of ways that nihilism is present in everyday life. I’ll be diving into three of them in this post. Let’s start with nihilism at school.

Nihilism at School

Nihilism is more prevalent within our schools than we may think. When approaching nihilism within schools, Gertz brings forward some ideas from a Brazilian philosopher named Paulo Freire. Gertz points to Freire’s observations regarding the rigidness and the industrial/commercial nature of our current education system. Check out the quote below.

“When teachers are trained to educate by talking at students, and students are trained to be educated by passively listening to teachers, learning is reduced to repetition.” - Nihilism, p. 117

Freire uses the metaphor of a bank to further convey his thoughts on the current education system. He argues that information can be viewed as a form of currency - a “currency that teachers deposit into the minds of students''. Due to this “passive listening” model of education, students are therefore viewed as “banks” waiting to be filled with information. This educational model is wrong because it assumes that education is nothing more than a process of information exchange. Information is highly prized within our society, and Gertz explains that what the information means is slowly becoming irrelevant, rather, all that we increasingly care about is that information is possessed. This makes the learning process similar to an economic transaction.

This could also explain why plagiarism is such a common thing within schools. If students were truly at school to learn, why would they be drawn to plagiarism? After all, plagiarism is quite the opposite of true learning. The answer lies in the ideas brought forward by Freire and Gertz - due to how our current education system is designed, learning is reduced to rigid, industrial-esque “passive listening”, which ultimately transforms what we consider to be “education” into more of a robotic exchange of information. As Gertz so clearly puts it;

“Learning is still spoken of in schools using the same hallowed language that has always surrounded it, giving it the aura of something intrinsically good. But because the language of learning does not match the practice of learning, students simply come to see education as hollow and school as a chore.” - Nihilism, p. 119

Now, how is our current education system nihilistic?

This rigid and robotic style of education is aimed at preserving the status quo and keeping society relatively stable and functioning. It achieves this by rewarding conformity. Gertz explains how our current system of education pushes this by associating conformity with the moral “good”. When a student is obedient and listens, this will result in good grades and praise, which will ultimately lead them to being a good student. Thus, conformity = good student.

This emphasis on conformity and preserving the status quo is exactly what Nietszche identified as a form of nihilism. Check out the following quote:

“As Nietszche warned, a society that only values its own survival, that only values the protection of the status quo, is a sick society, a society that creates good citizens but bad humans.” - Nihilism, p. 122

This model of education wants to preserve stability and wants to make life easy, which admittedly is a noble goal. With this being said, stability and an “easy life” are not exactly great inhibitors for both personal and societal growth. Challenges and adversity are necessary for a society and the people within it to develop and be prosperous. As Gertz puts it, “an easy and stable life is really just a slow and steady death. In other words, such a life is nihilistic” (p. 124). If we employ a model of education that prioritizes conformity, stability, and views learning as merely an exchange of information, it is denying students the ability to truly grow (and eventually find meaning), which could be argued as being nihilistic, or a “slow and steady” intellectual death.

Nihilism at Home

It could also be argued that we engage in nihilism within our homes as well.

As established above, nihilism can be defined as the belief that life has no inherent meaning, but I also interpret this definition as “trying to escape from certain aspects of life, which in turn denies those parts of life from having any meaning”. The nihilism seen within our homes has a strong connection to escapism.

Many things we do to unwind at home are connected to wanting to escape. We watch terrible reality shows on Netflix to be distracted, entertained, and comforted. The fact that these forms of media invoke feelings of being distracted is enough for philosophers to jump on TV shows and label us as being nihilists for watching them, as they “distract us from the feelings of true, real life”, but I don’t think this argument is entirely convincing.

The stronger argument for nihilism within our homes, is the “pseudo-world” that the media we engage with creates for us. The things we watch on TV within our homes, or the things we see on our social media feeds, are created with the goal of keeping us watching for longer. Not only is this media specially tailored with the goal of keeping us watching for longer, but they also give us a way to witness events and receive information without having to leave our houses. As Gertz puts it;

“rather than providing us with experiences of real life, radio and television provide us with a pseudo-reality (events staged for mass consumption) that we can pseudo-experience (consumption from our couches) in our pseudo-lives (consuming near others rather than being with others)” - Nihilism, p. 112

Gertz also points out that, within forms of media such as TV shows, we are given a false sense of what reality should be like. Problems or conflict are usually resolved within an episode or a season, and it gives us a sense of false comfort that everything will always work out in the end, which is why we find them to be extremely comforting. The philosopher Theodor Adorno worried that these strong, repetitive feelings of comfort would also result in reinforced feelings of complacency. We become complacent because we falsely believe that everything always works out in the end, and that the status quo will and must always be preserved. Gertz highlights the fact that these forms of formulaic programming not only comfort us, but they train us to believe that the preservation of the status quo is good, and disruption of it is bad. As mentioned above, this attachment to the status quo could be argued as being a nihilistic tendency.

“Evading reality through staring at screens has become the status quo, the status quo that screens train us to conform to and to be complacent about, the status quo that we have come to accept as good to preserve and as bad to disrupt.” - Nihilism, p. 115

Nihilism and Technology

It could be argued that the technology we use also encourages nihilism.

Gertz argues that our technological systems induce nihilism, and he outlines how technology and tech companies take advantage of our tendency to latch on to certain emotions.

To highlight the connection between nihilism and technology, Gertz brings forward a few ideas from the French sociologist Jacques Ellul, including how technology influences us politically. He rejects the commonly-held belief that “the state decides, and the technology obeys”, and to prove this, he examines how decisions surrounding technologies are made. Ellul highlights the fact that, in order to make informed decisions regarding technologies, a government must consult with technology experts, as politicians and other members of the elected political executive often don’t fully understand how certain tech works. They turn to these technology experts to draft legislation, create laws, and to shape their own understanding and opinion. The thing is, these laws and opinions surrounding technology also affect the very same technology experts which are doing the “informing”, which leads Ellul to raise skepticism surrounding the objectivity and impartiality of these experts. Due to this, it is unlikely that political decisions truly come into conflict with technological progress. Therefore, as Gertz states, “companies like Facebook and Google can act in ways that endanger not only individual users, but entire societies” (p. 175). This is supported by the numerous scandals that have emerged within the tech world over the past couple years.

This also gives technology companies the ability not only to infringe upon our rights, but also the ability to redefine what we think our rights should be. As an example, Gertz highlights the fact that these companies not only violate our privacy, but they also redefine our definition of “privacy”, as illustrated by the passage below:

“Facebook and Google - not to mention tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Tinder, and Twitter - all defend their privacy-endangering practices by simply pointing out that they are only giving users what users want. If users want to be social, then apps and devices need to be able to help them find others to be social with, and need to be able to find more and more ways for users to share more and more of their lives with others, And if users want to meet the right others, and learn about the right events, and find the right products, then apps and devices need to know as much as possible about the activities and interests of users.” - Nihilism, p. 176

In other words, these infringements upon our privacy are packaged up and reframed as something being done in order to create a better product for us, or to help make our experience more seamless. As Gertz remarks, users are coerced to see abuses of trust as merely the “price that must be paid” in order to continue to use these platforms and be social. This is an interesting point because it highlights the fact that those who want to protect and retain their privacy, which usually entails being inactive or distant from social media, are now viewed as “antisocial” by society.

As a whole, our definition of “social” and “privacy” has been redefined, arguably by tech companies, to benefit themselves. We willingly accept the “trade-off” of being victims to these infringements, because we believe that they are necessary in order to be participating on social platforms to begin with, which may be true, but it still doesn’t reduce the presence of those infringements in the first place. Ultimately, we accept these violations upon our rights because we believe that social media is a means to our ends, such as the ability to seamlessly stay connected to family and friends, but in reality, it could be argued that we are increasingly becoming a means to the ends of tech companies.

So, why do we so easily buy into this way of thinking?

As stated by Gertz, from a Nietzchean perspective, our embrace of the technological world and our “brushing off” of the violations committed can be attributed to our nihilistic needs and desires. These nihilistic needs include wanting to avoid feeling alone, feeling powerless, or in other words, feeling human. It could be argued that our nihilistic needs overshadow the negatives of the technological world, and that’s why we could care less about some of the things that tech companies get away with. We’re so caught up in chasing the feeling of being well-liked, popular, and looking wealthy or successful, that we’re blind to the “nihilistic nature of technological progress”.

This is all great, but what’s the take away?

Now, my goal with this post isn’t to bash any of the behavior mentioned above. Just like many of you reading today’s post, I love watching Netflix, using social media, and am a product of today’s education system. If one were to think hard enough, a philosopher would probably be able to find nihilism in virtually every aspect of our lives. If someone were to take a strict approach to combating nihilism, it would be a hopeless fight - we’re all hardcore nihilists according to this line of thinking; we love our TV shows, our Instagram feeds, and so on. As humans, we’re always seeking pleasure, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I think the problem lies with what constitutes ‘pleasure’, and how and where we seek it out.

I think there exists a category of ‘pleasures’ which are strongly linked to escapism. They help distract us from life itself, and while they can be useful, too much of anything is a bad thing, I personally think this is where nihilism threatens us the most. If we overindulge in these escapist pleasures, it means that we begin to love the pseudo-reality that they create for us more than our own lives. If we’re always living on or through social media, or we’re living through the characters within our favorite soap operas, it is effectively denying our own life from having meaning. In other words, this escapism slowly becomes our sole “goal” or “meaning” within life.

Posting that perfect Instagram update from Cabo is great, but posting on social media shouldn’t be your “main” purpose or primary source of meaning in life. Why? Because I would argue that it engages in escapism. Deep down inside, you know you’re posting because you want others to think that you’re having a great time. There’s no substance in that, nor is there any genuine “you” in that.

My takeaway from nihilism would be this; it’s okay to indulge in these escapist pleasures from time to time - we all do - but ensure that the meaning you’re seeking within your life is truly yours. Write that book, learn to play that instrument, get that degree - create your own sense of meaning, but ensure that this definition of “meaning” isn’t driven by an external force, such as escapist or nihilistic desire.

To be nihilistic is to deny life of having any meaning. This doesn’t necessarily mean that a nihilist walks around everyday, shouting at the top of their lungs that life is meaningless. Rather, a nihilist can be someone who is so caught up in escapism or trying to run away from certain aspects of life, that this escapism becomes their sole sense of meaning, which makes it easy to lose track of what their own, independently-formed definition of “meaning” was in the first place. Alternatively, I believe that a nihilist can also be someone who thinks they have the authority to dictate or tell others what their “meaning” should be, as by doing this, they are effectively denying people the ability to formulate their own definition of a meaningful life.

If you want to be a social media influencer, that’s great, and I’m rooting for you, but ensure that you want to pursue this because it genuinely reflects you, and it isn’t driven by wanting to be perceived a certain way, or because someone else told you it’s the right thing to do. Any factors, behaviours, or people that impact how you define what is “meaningful” within your life is nihilism in my opinion, as it takes away from the only entity who can genuinely and accurately determine what constitutes a “meaningful life” - you.

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