More of the real thing…

One of the advantages of living in Korea is that I don’t have to watch US television commercials. I’m not a big broadcast TV watcher anyway, but that might be more from not having much to watch that’s of any interest. I do watch Korean TV shows, but one of the wonderful things about them is that they’re largely commercial free. They cluster their advertising around breaks in shows, which gives viewers the opportunity to take care of whatever business they feel necessary without missing anything.

Of course, the challenge for advertisers these days is getting around the streamers. But even they can give you commercials on the rare occasion. Like today. Amazon Prime is showing the Cowboys, 49ers NFL playoff game; so I get to sit here at eight in the Korean Monday morning and watch actual American football, complete with CBS broadcast commercials, on my living room TV (and it looks great – I don’t think I’ve seen a football game on this TV yet).

Maybe it’s my lack of exposure to these commercials that makes their methods and messages so stark to me.  We know that from the earliest days of TV, advertisements have been about presenting things in a way that makes us all want to buy what they’re selling, but when you don’t have to put up with watching them as often, they tend to look even more manipulative and unrealistic. They’re still selling a fantasy, and when you’re living outside of fantasy-land, it’s a bit harder sell.

I can’t help but think this all goes right along with the beautifully curated lives we see on social media. What kind of people have we become when “influencers” amass millions of followers? Still, I certainly shouldn’t begrudge anyone their pleasures. While I like to write and ride and do my own thing as far removed from the fantasy as possible, I shouldn’t be so vain as to say anyone else should give up their reality TV habit and be like me. I have a friend who gambles, and he sees any losses as part of the entertainment. Maybe over the same time I’ve spent a thousand dollars on my cycling habit, he’s spent the same on gambling. It’s all the same thing to him.

But one must wonder how much of what people are watching is affecting the way they perceive (and live) life. Just like in advertising – which tries desperately to manipulate us into doing something we might not normally do – the things with which we flood our minds do the same. I can see the vicious cycle, fed by today’s algorithms – what we watch feeds what we’re shown; what we’re shown feeds what we watch. We’re trapped.

It’s really not easy to see a way out of it, either. I’m a big believer that the natural state of man is self-centered…there’s far too much evidence for that.  So the cynic in me tells me that when it comes to what we’re seeing on TV, maybe we’re getting what we deserve. And that really would be a cynical view if there wasn’t an alternative that offers some kind of hope – something that will free us from clinging to the fantasy being offered in all of what we watch and start turning to the reality of what we know in our hearts to be true. That there’s something more to life than what we’re constantly being fed by those who are trying to get something out of us.

We are spiritual beings, and the Bible tells us why in the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes:  “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” God has put eternity in our hearts – we know there’s something more than what we’re seeing here. Yet we’re unable to understand on our own what God is doing in this world. If we try, we’ll more as likely to come up with a feel-good story that fits right in with the fantasy.

But the gospel is counter-cultural. It doesn’t tell us that if we try hard enough, we can reach out and grab the good life. It tells us – like I said – that we are self-centered human beings, and as such we’ve rejected the reality. And that reality is that God created us and everything we see, and that, although we’ve rejected him and deserve the punishment fit for that, he’s made a way back for us. He’s sacrificed himself in Christ – paying for it by giving us his rightness and taking back the penalty for our rejection. Just like that. And only like that. We’ve got to get over the self-centered view that there’s still a chance that we can handle this on our own. If there was, then Christ dying on the cross becomes all the more cruel in its lack of necessity.

But the purpose of Christ’s death wasn’t a lost cause. His resurrection sealed it as the real thing. Because of that, it’s something to which we should all give much more serious thought, especially in a world that is pushing us to mindlessness and manipulation. I can get that much just by watching the commercials.