Ego destruction

I've been thinking a bit recently about how entertainment is different from other activities. There are a lot of fun things that wouldn't necessarily qualify as entertainment: running, talking with friends, eating and so on. And there are ways that entertainment can actually be pretty hard work. Difficult video games, for example, but also some books and movies require a bit of mental firepower. So what is it that makes entertainment entertaining?

One answer that occurs to me is ego destruction: things are happening, but they're not happening to you. I see this as related to my earlier post where I argued that your analytical system 2 shouldn't have as much claim as it does to being your true self. If self-awareness is an introspective process, operated by your system 2, then it stands to reason that being self-aware would be fatiguing. Entertainment is a way to turn off that introspection by turning off your concept of self entirely.

There are other ways to switch it off too, of course, like meditation or getting into a flow state, but those are more difficult. The great thing about entertainment is that it can do this on demand. Any time you're feeling fatigued from exerting your ego, you can get engrossed in a story and give it a break for a while.

I suppose that means that a decrease in time spent consuming entertainment would need to be matched by some other ego-less activity. Dedicating more time to work would be fine, but it would need to be work you could get engrossed in and lose your sense of self, or else you'd just end up really fatigued by it. Ironically, in most cases where you're trying to change your habits, you'd tend to be more introspective and less likely to enter that state.

Perhaps that's also a good reason to cultivate being non-introspective in everyday life, to reduce the amount of fatigue it causes and reduce your reliance on recreational ego destruction to recharge.