2026-08-07

I find it hard to read novels or watch TV shows anymore. Why? I ask myself.

It connects, I think, to a gradual "waking up". It is a phenomena Martin noted in his study of Finders – that they too gradually lost interest in fiction along with an interest in gossip.

That connection with gossip is interesting. A lot of fiction has an aspect of gossip; or better, gossip is a kind of real-world story-telling about the lives of others similar to fiction, with the same edge of voyeurism and schadenfreunde that hovers over fiction.

But let me come back to my own experience. A concrete one. Somehow, the other day with my partner I found myself watching the first 10m of a spiderman movie. What struck me as almost unbearable was the casual unkindness, almost cruelty with which people treated each other. We had Tony Stark casually humiliating his assistant (Jon Favreau) and Peter Parker. And worst of all these others not only accepted it but felt it as almost appropriate, as their due. At same time, the suffering (in Buddhist sense) of characters is so visible yet so unremarked upon, in fact, it likely seems unapparent to them.

This i think is the nub of it. As one wakes up, a key stage is both a recognition of suffering in oneself and others and a growing meta-capacity to notice and reflect on both one's own thoughts and actions and those of others (at best in the moment, but at least in retrospect) and to start act out of that.

To notice: "oh i'm triggered by that". Oh that person must be speaking from suffering. etc.

And yet when one watches tv shows or reads (most) novels this capacity and aspect is almost entirely absent. Instead, much of what happens – and even most of the entertainment – comes from the characters repeated unconscious "collisions" with each other and the world as they blindly pursue their own desires.

Even reading the greats has become problematic. I re-read Middlemarch and Anna Karenina a few years ago. Both are books i read in my late teens or early twenties and deeply appreciated. But this time Middlemarch felt flat, even Anna Karenina. Why did none of the characters wake up for a moment to their predicament and start to act from genuine love and compassion. To the extent that novels do feature characters like that, e.g. Adam Bede in Eliot's the eponymous novel, it is an unconscious sainthood. Raskolnikov's repents in Crime and Punishment, he is even, one could say, transformed but it is a christian redemption, a recognition of sin and a kind of salvation, not an ontological transformation of self-awareness.

Aside: looking at Tolstoy's later work I read The Death of Ivan Ilyich a couple of years ago. You can pull the dawning shift in Tolstoy's being. the irony though is that the novel(la) is less fulfilling as art than say War and Peace or Anna. It is also noticeable that Tolstoy himself seemed to become less interest in fiction and art in general as his spiritual path progressed.