Entertainment

Recently I started thinking about people's seemingly unquenchable appetite for entertainment. Contrary to most of my posts this one is not very practical as it is philosophical. I realized that in a book I read in my English class named "Brave New World" that people love escape. People seem to find that escaping reality is very enjoyable and addicting. People get addicted to drugs and alcohol because it lets them escape from reality. Why are people so pressed to find escape? This is not only in the form of drugs or alcohol though. People can find escape in the form of what is known as entertainment. We love entertainment so much, even though many people seem to agree that is usually bad for us. Take for example video games. Children love playing them, for whatever reason, but parents keep telling them that it is bad. If it is bad why do we desire it so much? Why do we as people want things that we know are not good for us? We seem to love doing things we think are not good for us. The things we find we should be doing, we don't really seem to like doing most of the time. Exercise, studying, dieting, helping the homeless, you name it. We just contradict ourselves a lot. Why are we like that? Why are humans so prone to entertainment and yet we think it's bad? Honestly I don't know the correct answer, because no one can really answer that, but I think I might have an answer. Again this is by no means the correct answer, just an interesting idea I had. I believe we humans enjoy entertainment so much because of what it allows. It allows us to escape from reality, and allows us to think about something else than our present situations. So why do we want escape? Not all humans are necessarily in bad situations so the question is fair. Even "successful" people want to be entertained. Perhaps people were made to want something that is not able to satisfied in this world, so by escaping the present world we get a taste of something that our reality could not offer. The more we are entertained, the happier we are, but no matter how much we are entertained we are never truly satisfied. I believe this is because we never truly reach that "something" that we desire. So we keep trying by continuous entertainment, but it still does not satisfy. So what is it in us that desires this mysterious thing? Why do we want something that we can't get in our world? Why do we have to escape? I think that each one of us has something greater inside us than just flesh and bone. I think each of us has what people call a soul or spirit. I believe that this spirit in us desires things that our world cannot offer to us, not even by entertainment. I believe we were made to want something more.
-Smart