Our lives aren't scripted

For years now, possibly from as far back as the day I learned to speak, I've begged my parents to watch films with me. Night after night, I would pray for a bad night of television and back when I was younger, it was easier because we only had the bog-standard terrestrial TV channels: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.  Since coming in to the digital age, my mum or dad have always found some programme to 'start' watching or a random repeat of some show they used to love. So we haven't spent many nights watching films.

It's my dad really; he's always against putting a DVD on or watching a film. But tonight I've realised why. It's taken me nearly 20 years and a massive amount of films for me to reach this conclusion. Escapism. To take 1 hour and 40 minutes, or sometimes 2 hours, to watch a film...all we're doing is escaping our own lives; we're watching somebody else's world, through their eyes, feeling their pain and conveying emotion which comes from a built-up fantasy world which doesn't even exist.

And that's fair enough, sometimes we do need to escape.

But tonight I've realised that when we escape our own lives for a couple of hours, watching a film or box-set, we're missing out on the world WE live in. This may not make sense to you, but look at it this way - we might miss the evening news, a new television series or an episode of a soap opera. And at the time it might not seem a big deal, nor a problem. We live in a world which revolves around the televsion; day-to-day conversations are based on what happened last night on TOWIE, or who killed who in Eastenders and, to you, it may not matter to be part of the conversation. But, it's good to know what's going on in the REAL WORLD.

I'm struggling to explain what I mean... I've zero common sense and when this is combined with my standard of general knowledge, which is at rock bottom, I come across as pretty thick. But my dad, he knows everything. So, I'm beginning to think that spending my time watching the News, boring (educational) information programmes and being part of the world I live in (rather than one on the screen) can only teach me things.

We need to live our lives instead of trying to live through a character.