Gongol.com Archives: May 2025
May 16, 2025
The Washington Post has published a feature story on a woman who has broadcast virtually every minute of her life to a video stream for more than three straight years. It is evident from even a cursory encounter with the story that the woman in the profile is in serious need of a rescuing intervention by friends and other people who care deeply about her welfare. Her circumstances cry out of loneliness and hardening isolation. ■ But an intervention is in order, too, for the many viewers of "Emily" and her live stream. Everyone is entitled to some guilty pleasures in their entertainment choices -- once in a while. It's OK to periodically choose to zone out for a bit, if that's what one's mind needs in order to recharge. ■ What isn't OK is indulging in an obsession with watching in on the lives of others. It is, on one level, an unhealthy form of voyeurism -- something that could readily earn a visit from the police if the subject of the surveillance were the next-door neighbor. (That "Emily" and others like her voluntarily subject themselves to this gaze may grant it the legitimacy of consent, but it doesn't change the fundamental matter that it's an indulgence in the forbidden fruit of shattering another person's privacy.) ■ On another level, it's a titanic waste of precious time. For as long as humans have known how to communicate, we've been sharing stories with one another, and those stories have been used to communicate discoveries, both big and small. It may not be the case that every answer has already been discovered, but it is true that human nature is so reliably constant that there are relatable anecdotes and nuggets of life advice to be found in thousands of years' worth of biographies, poems, treatises, and works of fiction. ■ Whether they realize it or (more likely) not, people tuning in to watch live streams of other people's lives are doing so, at least in part, because they instinctively sense that by watching others they will pick up on lessons they can use for themselves. But if they obsessively watch just one person -- or if that person is trapped in a doom loop where the only thing they can do is unreflectively feed the content machine -- then the audience will never really gain any knowledge worth using.
