The Proper Binge
Life itself is the proper binge, said Julia Child, because of course she did. It’s an idea that’s always appealed to me, maybe because it feels like the more polished side of the same coin as Mick Jagger’s, who once said that anything worth doing is worth overdoing.
I’m fairly certain that neither Julia nor Mick were talking about spending hours on the couch devouring Love is Blind from end to end in a single afternoon, but alas here we are.
Why do we binge? The term is fraught, stirring, at best, connotations of indulgence and debauchery, but at worst, of potentially disordered behavior. Even though it may operate on a vast spectrum, this abandonment of our impulse control is nevertheless a means of coping with anxiety, stress, and depression. Sometimes it’s an approach for mindless decompression after a challenging day, and sometimes it’s because you’re sequestered in your home for the foreseeable future while a global pandemic spirals out of control. So, we all have our reasons.
Last January Mashable ran a series on the how and why of the binge-watch, unpacking why we prefer it as a solitary pursuit, or why we feel lost when we finish a series, or even why we turn to some shows as old friends, “comfort bingeing” on things we’ve already seen a million times. Though we should probably come up with a better term for it, the binge-watch at least isn’t all bad. According to Dr. Hamira Riaz, it can actually create hours of space to work with our emotions and our relationships as we parse our own experiences through narratives and characters.
While I’m hesitant to be bright-siding a crisis, we now have a surfeit of time to do some work on our core. In between the scrolling and cleaning and cooking and caring for family members (and oh god the scrolling), what space can we carve out for ourselves, not only for comfort, but also for reflection and hope? You only have one life to binge.