Being surrounded by hardcore tech bros on a regular basis, I have been very often challenged to justify the amount of time I spend watching movies. After all, even though not all say it my face, doesn’t watching TV seem like a waste of time?

Usually I default to explaining that there are only two scenarios in which I watch a TV show or a movie: either I am passively listening to a tv series while I am waiting for my code to compile, or I am watching an Academy Award nominated or otherwise celebrated film in order to gain a deeper understanding of both film-making as a medium and of story telling as a whole.

The first scenario arises out of the fact that I learned very quickly in high school that if I focus too intensively I lose track of time and I end up obsessing for hours over a minor problem instead of retaining perspective on my overall work progress. Don’t get me wrong: I still listen to instrumental music (lots of Hans Zimmer) when I work, but I started noticing that after a while the music only shut out the outside noise but listening to a playlist on repeat in no way helped me retain a productive work flow. A tv show on the other hand works very well, because it follows a narratve and there are breaks every 45 minutes or so (which weirdly enough coincide with my pomodoro tech-breaks), and I realized is somewhat more productive than simply listening to a song. It helps me stimulate my imagination subconciously, and it keeps me updated on a lot of pop culture as opposed to waiting the same exact amount of time for my code to compile without getting anythign out of it. It works for me, not saying it works for everybody.

The second scenario however is more important to me. After all, I clearly don’t value the content of the tv shows or movies I listen to while I work since my rentention rate is probably below 50%, but I do very much value the content I absorb by watching cinematic masterpieces. Granted, I actually hope to eventually work in film in some way at some point in my life. However, irrespectively of that I do feel that I get a lot of benefit from watching Oscar-nominated films, and it goes beyond merely becoming a better story teller which can help tremendously in business.

I have come to embrace just how impactful cinema can be on our daily lives. All forms of art after all can help us by both reducing our anxiety and stress about our lives through escapism (without the need of medication) and by making consider news way with which we can deal with reality. Fiction creates safe spaces where we can express deep emotions (Ex. grief with drama, romantic love with Rom Coms, and so on…) and achieve Aristotelian catharsis, learn about our own biases and how they affect the way we treat others (Ex. To kill a Mockinbird), or even understand highly complex ideas that we would find extremely difficult to understand in a non-narrative form (Ex. Inception, Interstellar).

Art in all of its forms is able to communicate messages and ideas on a layer beyond the rational and the logical, by stimulating all parts of our minds. Aristotle writes in the Poetics that there are 3 dimensions to persuasion: 1) Pathos 2) Ethos and 3) Logos. He ranked them in this order because he noticed that in Ancint Greece (IE one of the most intellectually advanced civilizations in history) the ideas that would prevail in the “marketplace” were almost always not successfull because the evidence and logic behind them. Aristotle noticed that the authority of the speaker and more importantly their ability to engage with their audience on an emotional level was a far better indicator of success in persuading others than logic alone. This of course pissess off scientists all the time, because they try to purge academic thought of anythign other than logic and someotimes authority.

At the end of the day however, what is the point of discovering new truths about the universe if whoever discovered them is not able to share that truth widely and with others? That’s where art comes in, because poetry, painting, and music are such effective mediums of communication. Specifically through the latter two, we are able to communicate on a deeper leve than we would with language alone: photographs of Syrian children dying in Aleppo are able to motivate our ethical conduct without “saying” anything. Music has been proven not only to be able to change your mood, but also to be deployable as a theurapeutic tool to deal with depression and anxiety disorders.

Cinema at its highest form brings all of the powers of art together, which is why it’s so unique. After all, if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a thousand pictures must be worth a million words! But a film is not merely a sequence of pictures these days, it brings together music through the soundtrack, which extremely elevates the stakes of the story (think of how differnt of a movie Gladiator woudl have turned out to be without the soundtrack), and the script allows you to deploy poetic reflections of the human condition in a way that sticks beyond the page, thereby making the message something permanent and not temporary.

Only recently did I start suspecting that part of the reason movies offer a great medium to explore complex ideas in philosophy and physics is that they are essentially multi-sensory thought-experiments. Thought of experiments are so great in philosophy because they provide somewhat concrete scenarios in which we are forced to apply a theory or we get to oberve the behavior of an idea in a practical context, and by doing so it forces to engage with the idea not merely on a passive level (IE being forced fed information Banking Method style) but on an active level, stimulating not just our prefrontal cortex but also our active memory. The limitation of thought experiments however is that they are still abstract, for they are merely fictionalized scenarios in which an idea takes place. Yes, they are far more effective in dealing with complex ideas then merley talking about thigns in a vacuum, but there is a step further we can take to make such ideas not only more accessively but also more easy to process.

A great movie does not just create a visual and auditory representation of a thought experiment: it creates a multi-dimensional represenation of a large idea that lets both our concious and subconcious break down a problem. After all, we can ideo-experiment (my version of the verb form for “thought experiment”) all we want with Decardes’ ideas about dualism and the deceptions of evil demons, but we can collective arrive to much more interesting answers if we explore those very same questions through Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” and Christopher Nolan’s “Inception”. There is why that’s the case is that by making the problem more accessible by shifting the scope of the question away from “How do I know my existence is real?” to “Did Cobb get out of Limbo at the end of Inception?” we are able to more efficently apply our efforts. After all, if we apply X amount of neurological power towards a problem of N size, we can expect to gain proportionally more insight if we get to apply X power to a smaller N problem.

However last night I realized that we can even stretch the power the cinematic medium, and weirdly enough it came from the tv series Rick and Morty. If you are not familiar with the show, stop whatever you are doing and watch it immediately (it’s only 2 shorts seasons of 20 min episdoes), or if you must you can skip ahead and just watch this amazing analysis by Wisecrack. Essentialy through the character of Rick Sanchez, we are able to pretty much personify post-modern nihilism. Think about that for a second: a thought experiment uses a scenario to concretize an idea, while a movie uses a narrative to concretize a series of ideas. A character however, can literally personify an idea and its necesssary implicatinos in such a crazy way that it doesn’t limit what we can learn from it in the traditional way. It enables someone already familiar with philosophy to interact with someone who isn’t without having to summarize the entire knowledge to set up the premise of post-modern nihilism. This is so great because it sets a level playing field to talk about post-modern philosophy and the implications of modern physics in a way that each party can equally contribute to the discussion. Now the conversation no longer goes “yo, how do you think we can internalize the meaningless of the universe in our daily lives?” and “wait what? What do you mean?” and “you know, nihilism and shit” and “nihi-what?”…leading to a long-winded and inefficient explanation of how we got to post-modernism in philosophy. Instead the conversation goes “do you think Rick is a hypocrite for judging Jerry for being a fool even though under his world view their existence is equally meaningless?” and the interlocutor can immediately contribute productively to the conversation!

Rick and Morty is so amazing in that in not only sets up narratives to ideo-experiment with, but it also sets up characters that help us break down really complex concepts that are very time-consuming to explain. This is why I try to average a movie a day: this is the magic of cinema!