Is Reality Television Real?

I love reality television.  I can’t get enough of Gordon Ramsey, the Amazing Race, and even Jersey Shore (I know, I know—most are probably thankful it’s ending).  Of all the shows though, my two favorites have to be Survivor and Big Brother.  What interests me the most about those two shows is the social interaction and aspect of each game.

You can’t go into them thinking you’ll just be ruthless, seize all the power, win all the challenges, etc.  The mean, aggressive players are some of the first to be voted out.  Just look at the Hantz clan and all of their follies.  I can’t even imagine some of the holding down jobs with their anger issues let alone winning a social game.  You may win every challenge or be conniving and deceitful, but in the end, when the people that have voted you out now have to pick a winner, you're out of luck.

You also can’t be weird or annoying.  Look at all of the odd castaways on Survivor that have gone home: “federal agent” Phillip, Coach, Tarzan from last season.  One of my favorite weirdos was the Hispanic dude from Cook Islands, Billy Garcia, who was a tad lazy around camp, never seemed to quite fit in, and who awkwardly thought he shared a love connection with Candice, even though she simply replied “we love you” to his charge of not being well-liked by the rest of the castaways.  He just seemed so out-of-place socially in the game, and his perceived, one-way romance was the icing on the cake.

Last night’s Big Brother gave me new-found respect for Dan.  If you don’t follow the show, skip on to the next paragraph, but basically Dan, knowing he was going home, devised a plan to stage his “Big Brother funeral”, rat out all of his former alliance members, join the Head of Household, Frank, in a new alliance, and get Jenn with her Power of Veto to pull him off the block.  And it worked.  He even accused his closest ally, Danielle, of heinous misdeeds, sending her into a bawling emotional fit, only then to tell her that it was all his master plan to get sympathy votes for her.  Jenn pulled Dan off the block, put up Brittany (who I had been rooting for the entire season), and Dan pretty much guaranteed himself a spot in the final two.  From going home this week to potentially winning, THAT was impressive.

I realize that most of the crap on reality television isn’t real.  Most of it is scripted.  Most of it is filmed in a way to make it seem real.  For example, the last episode of Hotel Hell saw an executive chef fainting when being eviscerated by Gordon Ramsey.  The entire episode was rather blasé, and I just pictured the production gang all sitting around thinking of some way to liven it up.  Well, a fainting executive chef would work.  Yeah, let’s do that!

But if Dan’s deviance, Danielle’s horror and subsequent crying fit, and even the Hantz’s aggression is all acting, those people deserve some Emmys.  I don’t believe any of that stuff is made up.  And that’s what I love about reality TV.  Real, solid, social interaction that is shocking in the displays of intelligence and emotion.  You can’t win those games by being a nice guy all the way through.  You can’t be shy.  You can’t be overly outgoing.  You can’t be a floater, sitting around hoping the target isn’t on your back.  You can’t be naïve.  Yet you can’t be paranoid.

Now read those last six sentences over.  They apply to real life, don’t they?  Think about it.  You’ll never succeed in the real world being the nice guy all the time.  After all, nice guys finish last, don’t they?  Someone will always stab you in the back, steal your work, discredit you, etc.  Sad, but true.  And shy people are considered introverts, socially awkward, and naturally the people that make all the money and have all the fame and/or power are not like that.  No politician has a fear of public speaking, you know?

Yet people that are the opposite, overly outgoing, tend to be annoying.  Like people who stomp their feet when they walk.  Pay attention to the people who annoy you and watch if they stomp their feet.  A friend a while back once inferred that people who stomp their feet as they walk do so because they are trying to attract the attention of others and/or are very insecure, loud, obnoxious people.  I hadn’t really given it much thought until I began witnessing the phenomenon myself.  Two annoyingly in-your-face coworkers, sure enough, stomped their feet everywhere they went, and the one was a 90 lb woman!

And if you sit around and do nothing all your life, it is going to pass you right on by.  Even if you have no desire whatsoever to leave a mark in the world, at least have fun while you are here.  I mean, that’s half the reason America has an obesity epidemic—because too many people are sitting around doing nothing.  Sometimes it's OK to shine.  It shows people that you are still trying hard to do whatever it is you are tasked to do.

As for those who are naïve, this relates a little to my last post.  Naivety is great if you are a Shaolin monk.  It’s not if you live in a place like America.  If you try live in a little box or cave, sheltered from the world, choosing to ignore the news and everything happening around you, you may find yourself in trouble someday.  Like when the zombie Apocalypse occurs, and you have no idea that your neighbors are walking corpses.  But likewise, you can’t go through life being paranoid.  Like my late grandmother who wouldn’t step foot onto her front porch without doing her hair for fear of her neighbors seeing her that way.  Not a healthy way to live your life at all.

We can learn a lot from reality television.  We can learn a lot from plenty of other things as well.  All we have to do is just open our eyes and observe.  Put ourselves in the shoes of others, go for a walk, and then look again.  The world is a beautiful place when you open your eyes and actually see it.

And as for reality TV or even real-life social strategies, I’m not the one to judge or tell you how to live your life.  But if you find yourself in one of those categories I mentioned above, and if you’re unhappy with yourself, maybe a good dose of reality TV will show you how to fix it.

Blind to the Ways of the World

I’m amazed at how content some people are with ignorance.  They live day to day without reading newspapers, watching news, surfing the web.  And I’m finding more and more of these people each and every day.  People that choose not to encumber themselves with technological tools such as smart phones and Facebook accounts.  People that don’t have cable or satellite subscriptions or even a television to watch them on.  What gives?

My wife’s aunt  is in her late thirties or early forties and can’t read.  Not English.  Not Vietnamese, which is her native country.  I just can’t imagine stumbling through life and seeing WORDS everywhere and not knowing what they say.  I mean, how could anyone go through life without having any inkling of what is going on around them? 

On the flip side, I see people that seem to LIVE on social networking sites.  I've even had some recent Facebook "friends" that have lost all social etiquette.  It seems some people, rather than choosing to give updates on their daily happenings or posting pictures of things they find interesting or exciting, have decided that Facebook is a prime market for proselytizing their political agendas.  It’s not like he or she would go around telling people in public that Romney is an idiot or Obama is inept.  Doing so would probably, at the very least, get a few choice vulgar words or middle fingers tossed at them.  Yet on Facebook they have no problem posting graphs and phrases outlining the fallacies of our president and/or his competitor.  Or worse yet, a few of my Facebook “friends” have posted glaringly inappropriate content.  Nobody wants to know that you think that lady’s butt looks nice, even though you used some outrageously vulgar language to express your sentiments.  Nobody cares that you think certain people have lied to you for years, and that they can all reside in a fiery biblical residence for their rest of eternity.  Nobody cares about your religion or your politics or anything else you post in an attempt to make people see your point of view.  Because either people will agree with you, or they won’t, and the ones that won’t will just think you are nuts and defriend/block/ignore you.

I’m not sure which is better, being completely naïve to the ways of the world or knowing entirely too much, especially with regards to close friends and members of your own family.

When I turned eighteen, I got a tattoo on my leg of the Chinese symbol for the word slave.  I had it lasered off in my late twenties because, well, it was the Chinese symbol for the word slave!   And really, I think it might have actually meant “female slave”—I know, how awful is that!—and I felt extremely embarrassed about it when I frequented Chinese eateries.  But the reason I got the tattoo in the first place was purely philosophical.  It was to always remind me that I am a slave to my desires.  In other words, I live in a capitalist, keeping-up-with-the-Jones’s society where everyone is judgmental of everyone else, money equals power, and we are raised from a young age to place value in material possessions.  I will always want things.  And each and every time I see something I want, that something begins to own me.  I’ve lost control.  I’ve become nothing more than a child lusting over a piece of candy.

For a while I actually dreamed of moving to China and joining a monastery.  I wanted to train my body and my mind to think without influence, to exist without needs, to accept all and judge nothing.  Of course, being a white American kid, I realized those were merely pipe dreams.  Sure I studied martial arts and read hundreds of books on eastern philosophies, but I had to be realistic.  And now that I’m a father and a husband, I wouldn’t trade my family for the world.  But I still envy those monks, knowing that they know nothing and yet everything at the same time.

Our minds, as babies, have not yet developed enough to understand the world in which we live.  And as we grow, we learn to love, hate, value, judge, believe.  We learn what is right and what is wrong, what makes us happy and what makes us sad.  But unfortunately all of that is relative.  What I judge to be good, like maybe voting for Obama for president, someone else may judge to be bad.  I value my Dodge Ram pickup truck, and yet I know a few people who detest the make and model and even hate the people who drive them, as I learned one day when a friend not-so-eloquently put his foot in his mouth by bashing people who drove them, not knowing that I had just purchased one a few weeks prior.  Oops!

So really, all of these things that we’ve learned since the time we were born really seem quite trivial and meaningless, don’t they?  Even down to the mere words we use to describe things.  Is it a spoon?  A utensil?  A lifter?  A ladle?  A spatula?  Did you walk here?  Or stroll?  Trot?  Bounce?  Saunter?  Oolala!  We use labels to define things, and yet those words do no justice for what I’m describing.  Each of you reading this is  picturing a different type of spoon—plastic, ornate, wooden, soup, large, small.  Does it matter?  All this knowledge in our heads is pointless.  Rather we should be focusing on the tangible and intangible.  Focus on what we observe.  Pass no judgment.  Do not label it.  Observe it, understand it, and then move on.

Having an empty, clear mind is a wondrous thing.  Because without that, we are all mindless slaves.  I’m a slave to my desires, and so are you.  I can’t just give up social media.  I mean, I can, but how else would I let all of my followers know I have this wonderful blog?  I can’t quit my job, because then I couldn’t put food on the table for my family.  I can’t give up drinking Red Bull.  Ok, maybe I can, but why should I?  We are born to be consumers.  We are born to grow up, go to school, get a job, have a family if we choose, grow old, and die…and buy buy buy all the way through.

Sad, really.  Life for those monks seems so much simpler.  And easy.  And peaceful.  They know a spoon is for eating rice, and that’s that.  They don’t get to hear daily about gas prices going up, injustices toward others, etc. etc.  It's no wonder they are some of the greatest thinkers mankind has to offer.

Maybe my friends and family who live life outside of the proverbial “Know” are onto something.  And maybe I shouldn’t have had that tattoo removed.