My boomer mom cannot exist without the TV on. She literally will wake up if you turn it off. When she switched to streaming instead of cable, the “are you still watching” messages were a big obstacle. Oh, and she spends more time on video games than I do.
Same with my dad. He needs therapy, but instead spends 18 hours a day watching westerns. Occasionally baseball, but there’s not a single second of cowboy-themed media he hasn’t seen at least 50 times.
Comfort shows are trauma coping mechanisms. But he won’t acknowledge that he’s riddled with fear of the world around him and his trajectory in it, he “just likes westerns”
Actually, I can kinda see why that might be the case. Westerns are often set in tiny towns with like 50 people. That’s a comfortable number of people to coexist with and Amy problem is easy to understand and solve. But he lives in a sprawling boundless community of thousands or millions, infested with threads of arcane and existential problems that he barely understands, let alone has any control over
My boomer mom cannot exist without the TV on. She literally will wake up if you turn it off. When she switched to streaming instead of cable, the “are you still watching” messages were a big obstacle. Oh, and she spends more time on video games than I do.
Same with my dad. He needs therapy, but instead spends 18 hours a day watching westerns. Occasionally baseball, but there’s not a single second of cowboy-themed media he hasn’t seen at least 50 times.
It’s genuinely incomprehensible to me.
Comfort shows are trauma coping mechanisms. But he won’t acknowledge that he’s riddled with fear of the world around him and his trajectory in it, he “just likes westerns”
Actually, I can kinda see why that might be the case. Westerns are often set in tiny towns with like 50 people. That’s a comfortable number of people to coexist with and Amy problem is easy to understand and solve. But he lives in a sprawling boundless community of thousands or millions, infested with threads of arcane and existential problems that he barely understands, let alone has any control over