Day 268: Practice Without Consequences
I had an aha moment last night when I realized that, for me, watching reality TV is part of my continuing education in learning about the human condition, psychology, and how our minds work.
It deepens my understanding of what makes people change and what makes them so fearful that they are resistant to change when they know it's the best thing they could do for themselves.
In many ways it's similar to what I get from reading fiction. I never saw the connection between the two before
It's about developing empathy and compassion and understanding people that are different from us, and watching how they live their lives, how they make decisions, what the repercussions of those decisions are, how it plays out in their lives immediately, and who they become moving forward because of those decisions.
It's like a case study.
Right now I'm watching the end of Big Brother, week two of Dancing with the Stars, and the new season 51 of Survivor.
There was a soul crushing moment in season 50's all star season of Survivor that still sticks with me because someone not only didn't trust their intuition or what they know about the game from playing it multiple times. Even worse, the night before he had a dream that spelled it all out. And he ignored every bit of it. It may be the most painful ignoring of your soul speaking to you I've witnessed on reality TV.
Oh, and the fun is just starting on The Traitors which is an amazing psychological game.
I would love it if they did an entire episode of the contestant interviews Alan Cumming, the host, does to pick the people who will be Traitors. I'm sure it would be a masterclass in profiling, in a good way.
We can learn so much about ourselves and how we would handle difficult situations, without having them in our real lives by actively thinking and feeling while we watch other people make their decisions.
It gives us practice without consequences.
It gives us a chance to notice what we recognize in someone else before we have to face it in ourselves.
That's where it becomes more than entertainment for me.
I'm not watching just to see who wins, who gets voted out, who gets betrayed, or who makes it to the finale. Of course, that part can be fun. I am watching the moment before the decision.
That is the part that fascinates me.
The moment when someone knows something but talks themselves out of it.
The moment when fear gets louder than intuition.
The moment when belonging to the group becomes more important than telling the truth.
The moment when someone can see the pattern in someone else but can't see the same pattern operating in their own life.
That's human. We all do it.
Maybe not on an island, in a ballroom, in a house full of cameras, or in a castle with Alan Cumming walking around in fabulous coats, but we do it.
We know something and then we explain it away.
We feel the nudge and then we ask ten other people what they think.
We see the red flag and then decide maybe it's not really red.
We have the dream, the gut feeling, the body signal, the repeated thought, the quiet knowing, and then some part of us still says, "But what if I'm wrong?"
That's why these shows can be so revealing. They compress human behavior, turning up the pressure. The familiar has been removed and that removes their personal safety.
They give people limited information, social stakes, shifting alliances, money, attention, rejection, competition, exhaustion, and the desire to be liked. And then we watch what happens.
We watch who stays connected to themselves.
We watch who collapses under pressure.
We watch who pretends to be confident and who actually is.
We watch who can adapt, who can apologize, who can tell the truth, who can read the room, who can hear their own intuition, and who loses themselves trying to manage everyone else.
And if we are paying attention, we can learn from that. Notice where we would have done the same thing. Where we would have ignored our own knowing too. Where we still want someone else to validate what we already know.
That's the gift of observing other people's choices from a safe distance.
We get to practice discernment without having to live the fallout.
We can ask, "What would I have done there?" and then be honest about the answer.
We witness how fear sounds when it is dressed up as logic.
We get to see how intuition often arrives quietly and early, before the evidence is obvious to everyone else.
And how expensive it can be to abandon ourselves in the moment when our inner wisdom is asking us to pay attention.
So maybe reality TV is not only a guilty pleasure.
Maybe it's a mirror. It's one more strange, modern classroom for understanding people, choices, fear, intuition, and the ways we either stay with ourselves or leave ourselves when the pressure rises.
And like every classroom, we don't have to take in every lesson.
But we can notice the ones that land. Because sometimes watching someone else ignore their knowing helps us recognize the next time we are about to ignore our own.
Today's Gentle Practice
Think about a time you watched someone else make a choice and felt something in you say, "I recognize that."
Ask yourself:
What was that moment trying to show me about myself?
Maybe it showed you a pattern.
A fear.
A place where you ignore your knowing.
A place where you are stronger now than you used to be.
Let it teach you without judging yourself.
Sometimes another person's story helps us see our own more clearly.
With you,
Lynn
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