• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

Reality sucks. Seriously. I don’t know about you, but increasingly, I’m avoiding the news because I’m having a lot of trouble processing what’s happening in the world. So when I look to escape, I often turn to entertainment.

I don’t have to turn very far. Never has entertainment been more accessible. We carry entertainment in our pocket. A 24-hour smorgasbord of entertainment media is never more than a click away. That should give us pause, because there is a very blurred line between simply seeking entertainment to unwind and becoming addicted to it.

Some years ago, I did an extensive series of posts on the psychology of entertainment. Recently, a podcast producer from Seattle ran across the series when he was researching the topic and reached out to me for an interview. We talked at length about the ubiquitous nature of entertainment and the role it plays in our society.

In the interview, I said, “Entertainment is now the window we see ourselves through. It’s how we define ourselves.”

That got me to thinking. If we define ourselves through entertainment, what does that do to our view of the world?

In my own research for this column, I ran across a post in Medium on how we can become addicted to entertainment: “Addictive behavior, especially when not to a substance, is usually triggered by emotional stress. We get lonely, angry, frustrated, weary. We feel ‘weighed down,' helpless, and weak.”

Check. That’s me. All I want to do is escape reality. The post goes on to say: “Escapism only becomes a problem when we begin to replace reality with whatever we’re escaping to.”

I believe we’re at that point. We are cutting ties to reality and replacing them with a manufactured reality coming from the entertainment industry. In 1985, author and educator Neil Postman warned us in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death that we were heading in this direction.

The calendar had just ticked past the year 1984, and the world collectively sighed in relief that George Orwell’s eponymous, dystopian vision from his novel hadn’t materialized. Postman warned that it wasn’t Orwell’s future we should be worried about. It was Aldous Huxley’s forecast in the book Brave New World that seemed to be materializing.

Postman notes: “As Huxley remarked in ‘Brave New World Revisited,’ the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions…  Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.”

Postman was worried then -- 40 years ago -- that the news was more entertainment than information. Today, we long for even the kind of journalism that Postman was already warning us about. He would be aghast to see what passes for news now. 

While things unknown to Postman (social media, fake news, even the internet) are throwing a new wrinkle in our downslide into an entertainment-induced coma, the trend is not exactly new. This has happened at least once before in history, but you have to go back almost 2,000 years to find an example.

Near the end of the Western Roman Empire, as it was slipping into decline, the Roman poet Juvenal used a phrase that summed it up: "panem et circenses," or “bread and circuses”:

“[T]he People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.”

Juvenal was referring to the Roman emperors' strategy to provide free wheat, circus games and other entertainment to gain political power. In an academic article from 2000, historian Paul Erdkamp said the ploy was a "corrupting attempt of the Roman emperors to cover up the fact that they were selfish and incompetent tyrants.”

Perhaps history is repeating itself.

There's also a noticeable change in the entertainment industry itself. In an interview in Vanity Fair, actress Scarlett Johansson noted that the 2025 Academy Awards ceremony was a much more muted affair than in years past, with hardly any political messaging or sermons about how entertainment provided a beacon of hope and justice. She suggested that was because almost all the major studios are now owned by big-tech billionaires. “It’s all these big tech guys that are funding our industry, and funding the Oscars, and so there you go," she said. "I guess we’re being muzzled in all these different ways, because the truth is that these big tech companies are completely enmeshed in all aspects of our lives.”

If we have willingly swapped entertainment for reality, and that entertainment is being produced by corporations who profit from addicting as many eyeballs as possible, prospects for the future do not look good.

We should be taking a lesson from what happened to imperial Rome.