ANGER, ANNOYANCE, IRRITATION, JOY, LAUGHTER, GRIEF, HATRED, HUMILITY, EMPATHY, EMBARRASSMENT, NOSTALGIA, PEACE, COMPASSION.

Looking at these emotions, try to categorise them into negative or positive.

This is quite an easy task. We’ll get to it later.

I’ve been wondering, why do so many people watch different series?

Why do more and more people use portals to watch TV series and get caught up in the life of fictional characters?

What do we lack in our own lives, that we want to delve into and identify with the lives of the main characters?

Before responding to my thoughts, I would like to reflect on both the series and human life. A series can consist of a long list of episodes with various threads and stories depending on its genre. So why do some people prefer to watch series on crime stories, horror or romance? What guides people when choosing a series to watch?

The answer is very simple and probably familiar to everyone: EMOTIONS.

This is why I previously asked you to categorise the emotions above into either positive or negative.

Let’s think about a popular series. Let’s pay attention to the main division of the characters: there are the bad and good characters, and we, the viewers, identify ourselves with one of these groups.

Think about which group you choose in relation to the series you watch and what emotions drive you during this choice.

This is quite an important question because this is how you will be able to answer the question of what you’re missing in life.

Now let me come back to the questions asked earlier. A person’s life can be monotonous and largely focused on repetitive activities. Everyday life without emotions leads to a feeling of boredom, and yet each of us would like to feel passion, joy, satisfaction or delight. There are also people who attract the feeling of fear and uncertainty. This happens so rarely that we feel these emotions through the series. We see on our screens everything that we desire to express in our day to day lives. Hence we may choose a variety of genres in order to release different emotions. This is what happens: we look for emotions, we miss them in life, nobody delivers them as much as we expect; thus the series fills the emotional void.

And what do the series do?

They move us.

No matter what the meaning of the word, they touch a person.

They provide him/her with what he’s looking for.

Now, let’s see if there’s anything negative that could result from this process:

Perhaps we start to live the lives of the characters of our favourite series to such an extent that we forget about our own lives. The series that supposedly provides us with the emotions we are looking for, actually suppresses them in us. They are only seemingly delivered because we don’t experience them; they only reside in our imagination. We only see them on our TV or computer screen. We observe and react. It works on the principle of “action reaction”, and then we turn off the monitor and come back to our reality. We think to ourselves “I wish I had a life like them in the series”. We start to think about our functioning and instead of being motivated to act – it is quite the opposite. Demotivation follows.

Is it worth it?

I agree that while watching, we can laugh, we can move, we can feel threatened and nervous, but one thing makes me wonder:

Isn’t it better to feel it all in real life?