Entertainment these days is so passive. You sit on the couch and watch a movie. You scroll on your phone (and fine, maybe your thumb presses a button every once and a while). You listen to a podcast or music, where other people talk about what they think, or other people sing and make music for you to enjoy.

We read books, but we don’t always think deeply about what we read. It’s easy to toss the book aside, check it off the “to do” list, and move on. Unless we write about the book, or discuss the book, we rarely think deeply about the connections between the book and our lives. (I’ll plug my business here — having a professional facilitator ask those questions will help you think more deeply!)

What active forms of entertainment are available to us? Here are some examples that I enjoy:

1. Going for a nature walk.
2. Having a passionate discussion.
3. Making art.
4. Playing piano.
5. Swimming in a lake or the ocean.
6. Rollerblading (this is mostly a nostalgic fantasy).
7. Rock climbing (this is also mostly a nostalgic fantasy, but I’ve done it more than rollerblading.)
8. Going to dance parties.
9. Playing rugby.
10. Creative writing.
11. Going thrifting for unique clothes or jewelry.
12. Skydiving (I’ve only done this once, but it was awesome).
13. Cooking (but only when I feel like it).

That was a surprisingly hard list to write, and I don’t do many of the things on the list all that often. Try writing your own! Then reflect: how often do you do the activities on your list?

Here is what I notice the items on my “active entertainment” list have in common: they take mental and physical energy (also, money). Passive entertainment is exactly that – it’s passive. You can do it lying down or sitting down. You don’t have to think. You are like the children in Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Veldt”: all you have to do is “look and listen and smell”.

Passive entertainment is cheap dopamine. We don’t have to work for our reward; it is delivered to us in short clips of other people’s lives. A 2025 study by the NIH found that prolonged social media use alters our brain’s reward system, creating the same effect as substance addiction. If you are familiar with addiction then you know that your brain will always crave more – and with AI algorithms designed to personalize our feeds, more entertainment is always readily available.

When I was first talking with friends about Novel Exchanges, several people told me they felt “too tired” to read and discuss after work. The insidious truth is that going home after work and flooding our brain’s reward system with cheap dopamine is actually making us more tired. For the cost of your attention, you can experience the mental reward of doing something…while doing nothing at all.

I am terrified of becoming a country of workers who work just enough to make the money necessary to go home and play on our phones. In the world of Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Veldt”, a family lives in a “house which clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them.” At first, this “Happylife Home” seems appealing. Who wouldn’t want technology to take care of all the mundane tasks we are so often “too tired” to want to do? But the question becomes: what would we do with our extra time? Would we become like Peter, who, when his father tells him he wants him “to learn to paint all by yourself”, responds: “I don’t want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?” Or would we feel like Lydia Hadley, who loses her identity as a mother to the house that “is wife and mother now, and nursemaid”?

The children in “The Veldt” sacrifice their humanity to preserve the machine. They choose to live forever in an electronic void that fulfills all their sensory desires. Back when I was a classroom teacher, I saw children stand in a circle and scroll on their phones, texting each other, laughing and sharing memes, but never interacting with each other in the ways that I considered to be genuine. Doomscrolling does not make me want to do or create anything. It just makes me want to be on my phone more. But we are not perceiving the world when we are on our phone. We are barely even conscious. Think about it – can you remember the videos you scroll through? That’s why we have the “save” button (and I don’t know about you, but I barely ever go back to look at whatever I saved, and even more rarely do I bother to take any sort of action with it). We press the button, think we’ve done something, and keep scrolling into oblivion.

Passive entertainment is destroying our humanity: the creative drive that flows through all of us, which is our consciousness. If we want to protect what makes us human, we will have to fight the addictive temptations of technology and nurture our relationships with the world around us. Instead of constantly consuming, we need to allow ourselves to be bored. When we are bored, we think. When we think, we create, and our ideas become reality.