For my birthday I got tickets to see Jimmy Carr perform his latest stand-up routine. Carr's style and humour is not to everyone's taste, since he tends to do a lot of one-liner comedy, but it is incredibly clever at the same time. Plus, for someone who is so well spoken, his style is dark.
This is the second time I have seen him, though my wife didn't know that when she booked the tickets. She said after that after the opening, she wasn't sure she was going to like it as it was just one line after another, but once he started interacting with the crowd, it really showed how talented he is as he was able to build upon what they were offering, and he got surprisingly brutal with some of them. Nothing is really off the table with him.
Taking comments from the audience is where he seems to enjoy himself the most and it is where the crowd enjoyed too, which was one of the lessons he wanted to share along the way. That it is the interaction that keeps him going, the shared experience, and the the momentariness of it. Live is so much better than watching on a screen. He is incredibly quick-witted and through years of experience and practice, he has multiple comebacks for pretty much anything that is thrown at him.
At the end of the show they went through texts that had been sent to him by the audience and one was from a girl who had been sneaking away once a month to Helsinki to do stand-up, without telling her boyfriend. He supposedly found out at the show. However, Carr was saying that this is what people should be doing more, where instead of being an eternal audience, we participate in what we enjoy. Be part of it in some way, even if we aren't able to earn from it, or we aren't that great at it. Find a way to be amongst it as more than a viewer.
I think that while we probably have more access to participate now, I reckon less of us actually are being part of the things that we love. Instead, we end up being voyeurs of what we love, not players. And again, this is something that he mentioned in his routine that resonated, that when we do what we are into, it is play. Play is how we learn, but it doesn't mean the game is easy, nor does it mean it feels good in my opinion. But when we are doing what interests us, what we are passionate about, we are able to push through the pain to keep on playing the game.
This got me thinking about something I have written about here in regards to myself never really being a fan of anything enough to dive into it. And I wonder if it is because I had pain in so many other areas, that I just didn't have enough energy left to play the games I was interested in. Which in turn got me thinking about my last article on opportunity and discrimination and how if we have to spend a lot of time and energy fighting just to survive daily life, how will we have enough left over to spend on what actually matters to us?
I guess privilege is being able to play the game unencumbered by daily struggles, to be able to focus and have the energy to put into interests. And it could be that this is part of the reason that people are not participating and are becoming pure consumers and users alone. Because the more we struggle, the less energy we have to spend and being a user is the easiest way to participate. We can live vicariously through a screen and "feel" like we are part of something, without spending our energy. But, it is a spiral downward, because the more we consume, the less energy we have to spend on the things that matter, as our time, skills and potential ebb away into the pixels.
With all the resources we have in this world, there needn't be as much suffering as there is, and there could be a huge amount of improvement made where we are active participants in our fields of interest, rather than scraping the bottom of the barrel by scrolling through feed after feed in the hope of finding something that delivers us into a better experience. Life on scroll is not a life well-lived, it is settling for the lowest form of living, that will continually generate new lows.
A lot of us don't have the opportunities we need.
A lot of us waste the opportunities we have.
Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]
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