Binge-Watching and Philosophy

 

By Emily Ruzich

The winter of 2017-2018 for me was filled with dread. Winters in Chicago are normally bad enough on their own, with the cold and lack of sunlight, but I had some personal problems to deal with as well. The novelty of Joe’s CMT diagnosis had worn off by that time and all that was left was the routine drudgery of it all. Some days were good and some days were bad, and there was no way to predict when the bad days would come. The worst CMT symptom that Joe deals with—nerve pain—comes in different shades on different days, but regardless, pain is pain and that is always bad.

Also, my 95-year-old father was very ill. He had suffered a debilitating infection that autumn, which had left him too weak to walk. By that winter he was living in a nursing home. Because of earlier medical complications, he was already living with only one kidney and only part of his colon intact. At that point, it seemed, optimism about his condition improving would have been misguided. His body was clearly on the decline.

The two men closest to me were both suffering—a lot—and I could not fix it. I could only help out in little ways, as caretakers do, always feeling that it was never enough. I could not cure them of the boredom and loneliness that come with being sick. As for offering hope, well, I was feeling pretty hopeless myself. I would go to bed each night not looking forward to the following day, not wanting to face the uncertainty and witness more pain and suffering that I had no control over.

During those winter evenings, Joe and I would watch the German series “Dark” on Netflix. The plot of “Dark” centers around the small, always-cloudy town of Winden that is shadowed by a menacing nuclear power plant and plagued by a series of mysterious child disappearances. All of the characters on the show are living with past traumas and dark secrets. No one appears to be trustworthy. Even the children act suspiciously.

Most of the show is accompanied by an eerie soundtrack of menacing-sounding stringed instruments. The intent seems to be to fill viewers with a sense of unease at every turn, even when we don’t know what exactly it is that we’re supposed to be afraid of.

Binge-watching this show helped me cope that awful winter. It was engrossing enough to take my mind off my problems. The dread that came with watching the characters of “Dark” try to unravel the mystery of the missing children helped me to temporarily forget the dread of living one day to the next with a sick husband and a sick father. Maybe it was a “double negative” effect. Two dread-filled experiences cancel each other out. And clearly, at least I didn’t have it as bad as the people in the show. While I had my demons to deal with, they were definitely not as bad as the mysterious evil force that seemed to have an entire town under its curse.

Once we finished Season 1 of “Dark,” we had to go through binge-watching withdrawal and patiently wait for the next season of the show to come out. We decided to give the Netflix docu-series “Wild Wild Country” a try while biding our time.  

“Wild Wild Country” is a testament to the truth of the old cliché, “Truth is stranger than fiction.” It tells the story of an Indian guru/spiritual leader and his mostly Western followers who set up a commune in rural Oregon. The series focuses mainly on the culture clash and conflicts that ensue between the commune members and the local residents of Oregon. Lots of really strange things happen. Various crimes are committed, by both the locals and the commune members, and by the end (spoiler alert) the guru goes back to India and the commune is in shambles. The guru himself, who has since died, had called the commune “a beautiful experiment that failed.”

At the end of the series, some former members of the commune reflect on their experiences and try to make sense of it all. One member compared the guru to the Armenian mystic and philosopher George Gurdjieff of the early 1900s, who would purposely put his students in difficult situations to see how they would react under pressure and help them learn about themselves.

This made me curious to learn more about Gurdjieff. I searched the internet to find out what sort of difficult situations Gurdjieff would create for his students. What little information I was able to find on this aspect of Gurdjieff’s teachings—he is much more well-known for other teachings, including the Enneagram model of personality types—showed that Gurdjieff was interested in breaking people’s ingrained habits. He would encourage his students to drastically change their diets and the times of day that they would eat, presumably just to mix things up a bit. If a person drank alcohol, he encouraged them to go dry. If a person did not drink alcohol, he encouraged them to imbibe extremely large amounts of it, just to see what would happen.

In group situations, he would insult his students and find other ways to push their buttons to make them angry, and then challenge them to remain calm. This was supposed to help them learn anger management techniques.

The most extreme situation involved thirty of his students sitting in a house for three months doing nothing but reflecting on their existence. Twenty-seven of those people could not handle it, and they ended up leaving the experiment and their teacher for good.

Lucky for me, I realized, I didn’t have to join a commune or study with a philosopher/mystic in order to orchestrate a situation that would push me to my limits. Fate had already taken care of that for me. Here I already was, on the brink, clinging to the small amounts of comfort I could take in TV shows and philosophy.

And what did I learn from this? I learned that I could handle it, although it wasn’t easy. I could live surrounded by suffering and keep on going. And while I would still have plenty of bad days filled with hopelessness and even anger at the circumstances, I could help to ease the suffering of others in some small ways.

It made me think of a time several years ago when I was the one who was very sick. I had been in the emergency room with severe stomach pains getting prepped to take a CAT scan of my digestive tract. I had to drink a special contrast fluid that would make my digestive system easier to see in the images. I don’t know what this fluid contained, but it tasted like rancid orange juice mixed with rancid apple juice and some radioactive cough syrup thrown in for good measure. I began to throw up, and there was no way I could control it. Joe was there with me, and he told me later how difficult it was for him to see me in that state. I realized that it was probably much harder for him to watch me than it was for me to be in that moment. My body was simply reacting in a way that I couldn’t control and I just had to go along for the ride.

Similarly, it is almost harder for me to remember my Dad being in the nursing home now, after he has passed away, than it was to spend time with him there last year. I was just living day to day and doing the best I could do at the time. But the most difficult part would always be leaving him in his room after my visit was over. I would feel relief that I could leave the depressing environment of the nursing home mixed with guilt over feeling this way when my father did not have the same luxury of being able to leave when he wanted to.

For me, being a caretaker is full of conflicting feelings like this. Obviously, I feel sad that my husband will continue to live with CMT. I feel sad that anyone has to live with chronic health problems. But it has also made me grateful for being relatively healthy and able-bodied, now that I see that it is not a given in life. At the same time, I question why I get to be healthy while others don’t.

I often wish I could do more to help Joe. But sometimes I don’t want to play the role of caretaker at all. I just want to forget that CMT ever existed, watch a movie, and eat some popcorn. Some days feel hopeless, when I think of how CMT will continue to affect our lives, and some days feel almost euphoric, when I am able to enjoy a good day with Joe simply for what it is.   

It is this mixed bag of thoughts and feelings that I leave you with now. Some of us suffer in poverty, some in luxury, and some in the between. You suffer, I suffer, we all suffer. And yet somehow we go on. 

Emily Ruzich is a full-time copy editor and has written many articles for publications around the country. She is married to Joe Ruzich and lives in the western suburbs of Chicago.  Feel free to send her feedback about this article.