I clicked on the link with some excitement towards someone admitting that Murakami's books tend to lack serious thought, which is the conclusion I came to after reading a bunch of them and starting to get disturbed by the common and lazy tropes they use.
But no! Instead the point is that he's apparently the only human still able to concentrate properly. Oh well.
It seems like it advocates the benefits of focus, but I dunno if the article's conclusions are quite that extreme. How do you feel about the differences between his early and later works? Which do you thinks seems more scattered, or more reliant on tired tropes?
And how do you feel about Murakami's works compared to other authors who focus on magical realism? Borges, maybe Gaiman? The genre can sometimes be heavy-handed in leaning on mythology as a narrative shorthand.
First, I presume he writes in Japanese, so the first question I would ask is are you reading it in Japanese. Translations vary greatly in quality.
Second, Asian literature often seems to follow a "Life continues with or without you" path and the characters may not learn anything and may have been completely bound to their (generally doomed) trajectory from the very start and just resign themselves to their fate.
Some call that deep and meaningful--I call it crap. YMMV.
I apparently am so completely steeped in Aristotelian tradition that I can't stand those kinds of stories. Ted Chiang, in spite of being an American, somehow channels this, and I found I had to force myself through his writing. I have held off on reading Liú Cíxīn because I'm terrified I'm going to bump into the same problem.
The Three Body Problem does have people caught in situations far bigger than them, but the characters do have agency and change the flow of history significantly.
I can only recommend these books, among the best I ever read.
In my personal experience being a native speaker of both languages and having read some of his books in both languages, the translators take great care to preserve the reader's experience. I have great respect for their work.
Interestingly, Murakami actually wrote (at least) his early works in English, after he found that writing in his native Japanese he was channeling too much other Japanese authors as well as the classical style of the time. His English was more plain, so he ended up with this relatively simple style that is now his trademark. He translated them back to Japanese for publication.
(source: Murakami wrote a couple of essays on his writing career)
> First, I presume he writes in Japanese, so the first question I would ask is are you reading it in Japanese. Translations vary greatly in quality.
Murakami is known for writing in Japanese as-if he was translating himself from English.
He's also the author whose fans most want him to win a Nobel even though his books aren't good enough. He's the ultimate boomer - as a teen real estate prices were so low he somehow ran a jazz bar while in college, and now he writes books about how it's impossible to understand the minds of women.
Wow. I don't usually go for snarky remarks like this, but you hit the nail on the head. It could be that he just realized he won't die a timeless author and curiously a Nobel most probably won't save him. A lot of past literature Nobel laureates are quite obscure and as it turns out - not that good after all.
In my personal opinion he's fairly strong at driving a narrative, but I never get to what end. Like a painter that works extremely hard at a masterpiece to finally pour some gasoline and set it on fire. Compared to an all star like Tolstoy for example he's just not cutting it even a bit.
I haven't read a lot of ""real"" Japanese literature but supposedly anticlimactic endings are appreciated there. I remember Kafka on the Shore having an especially bad one which I thought was very funny, he telegraphs an ending and then suddenly the book ends before it gets there.
But I do think too much of his writing is about the narrator meeting a series of mysterious women, not paying them enough attention and then pretending it's an ineffable mystery when they leave him. My favorite of his books is Hard-boiled Wonderland, where this doesn't happen. (There's an anime called Haibane Renmei whose plot is 100% plagiarized from that book.)
> Second, Asian literature often seems to follow a "Life continues with or without you" path and the characters may not learn anything and may have been completely bound to their (generally doomed) trajectory from the very start and just resign themselves to their fate.
Some call that deep and meaningful--I call it crap.
You don't know anything about Asian literature or literature in general.
I am a Bengali, and there are so much deep and profoundly interesting works in Bengali literature alone- I am afraid I am going to have to die before reading all the good stuff.
Although Bengali is 1200 years old, the modern Bengali literature only started about 200 years ago, and due to invasions and political unrest during 1200-1757, there are mot much volume of work of note.
Japan has had political unrest in its history, but it is a more continued (for the lack of a better word) culture. There must be 3x-10x more works in Japanese than Bengali.
And I have left out modern and medieval Urdu literature, and whole of China out of this comment.
The fact that you are putting all of the works- literally tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands pieces of literary art into "Asian literature" bucket and trying to generalize them foolishly shows your utter and complete ignorance in these matters.
I feel Murakami's earlier work was more natural and didn't try too hard. Not all was great, but his best work for me is Wild Sheep Chase. After The Wind Up Bird, he is mostly repeating himself. I don't see much depth in his works, at least in terms of "depth" how I would define it. Murakami is about alot of ideas who are not always connected or go anywhere. It's fun for a while, but gets repetative.
I didn't particularly enjoy WSC, although it was… more interesting than other books from him I have read. My favourite is (by far) Hard-boiled Wonderland and The End of The World. What did you think of it, if you have read it?
Reading this several times (and I will again) gives me the feeling that I am alive, in the most distinct, poetic way without too much sadness nor too much happiness. This book does something very special. I'm so glad it exists.
Long time Murakami fun here, have read all his books and recently re-read the Rat Trilogy (Wild Sing + Pinball, A Wild Sheep Chase, Dance Dance Dance). I agree that there is indeed repetitiveness in his most recent work but I still find a lot of his work insightful and somewhat relatable. One of the best imo ranking of his work can be found in [0].
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/murakami/comments/3q28p4/to_those_w...
I don't have the links but @richgel999 talking about being ready & able to live in a tent & work on texture compression sounded all the real to me, in a world where few are able to carve out that concentrated dedicated do.
So Cal believes that long stretches of time to focus are good, and so quitting your job is a good idea…
Well, I had a Sabbatical year and did indeed work on some great stuff, but not having anything on hand at all except writing itself can be quite boring, I discovered.
Didn’t Sol Weintraub do his best writing after his day to day work as a mason? He had ample time to think during the day and wrote at night.
I tend to agree with that. I work on a personal project and the fact that the time I can allocate to it is constrained makes me extremely eager to work on it when I can. If I could work on it 8 hours a day, I think it would become a chore after a few week and all my creativity would be replaced by boredom.
I like Cal Newport's ideas and have read and liked his book Deep Work.
> Neither our economy nor the demands of a live well-lived dictate that everyone should aspire to be sitting alone at a desk in rural Narashino, crafting literature to the light of the rising sun. My growing concern, however, is that such real commitment to thought has become too rare.
With that said generalisations like the one quoted are not substantiated. I don't think real commitment/passion to anything was that popular to begin with if we take the general population. Even historically if we take education levels back then.
In every field there are people that excel, people that go by and people that shouldn't be there. All of these are based on an individual's choice and priority/circumstances. Do I want to be the person that excels and be one of the best in this field or not? Murakami decided he didn't want to be just a writer, but a great one. Whether he succeeded is another matter, but he tried because he could and wanted it. I've read only "South of the Border, West of the Sun" and it was ok, but not really something special (IMHO).
I've read a fair bit of Murakami and I think he's at his best when he's deep into the surrealist, magical realism stuff. South of the Border only really touches on that. Kafka on the Shore, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World are books of his that I rather liked. I thought The Wind-up Bird Chronicle was a bit flabby but there is an excellent section of the story about Japanense soldiers in Manchuria during World War 2 that makes up for it. I know a lot of people that just don't really connect with his work though so there is that.
> With that said generalisations like the one quoted are not substantiated. I don't think real commitment/passion to anything was that popular to begin with if we take the general population. Even historically if we take education levels back then.
If take this a slightly different way: I think it is common, very common, but that it's normally for some specific thing that isn't fashionable or going to produce a measure of fame. A helluva lot of people are experts at one thing (edit: that they care deeply about and devote huge amounts of time to), it's just "growing unfeasibly large marrows" or "fixing bikes" or "building model railway layouts" or "training dogs" or "cage fighting" or whatever don't have the mystique or social cachet of the underachieving creative who drops everything and isolates themselves to produce award winning novels.
I quite like Deep Work as well, but with this post he seems very taken by romantic ideals of creativity and stereotypes of modern life
I used to live in Narashino a little over a decade ago. By no means rural, but definitely a small town compared to one of the Tokyo wards. Also, I wouldn't call it dense at all -- granted, I haven't look at the people/sqm metrics.
My favourite passage from 1Q84, full of serious thought:
The fluorescent light on the ceiling shone down on Ushikawa’s body. The heat was turned off, and a window was open, so the room was as freezing as an icehouse. Several conference tables had been shoved together in the center of the room, and on top of them, Ushikawa lay faceup. He had on winter long johns, and an old blanket was thrown on top of him. Under the blanket, his stomach was swollen, like an anthill in a field. A small piece of cloth covered his questioning, opened eyes—eyes that no one had been able to close. His lips were slightly parted, lips from which no breath or words would ever slip out again. The crown of his head was flatter, and more enigmatic-looking, than it had been while he was alive. Thick, black, frizzy hair—reminiscent of pubic hair—shabbily surrounded that crown.
Buzzcut had on a navy-blue down jacket, while Ponytail was wearing a brown suede rancher’s coat with a fur-trimmed collar. Both were slightly ill-fitting, as if they had hurriedly grabbed them from a limited supply of clothing that happened to be on hand. They were indoors, but their breath was white in the cold. The three of them were the sole occupants of the room. Buzzcut, Ponytail, and Ushikawa. There were three aluminum-sash windows on one wall, near the ceiling, and one of them was wide open to help keep the temperature down. Other than the tables with the body, there was no other furniture. It was an entirely bland, no-nonsense room. Placed there, even a corpse—even Ushikawa’s—looked like a colorless, utilitarian object.
No one was talking. The room was utterly devoid of sound. Buzzcut had a lot to ponder, and Ponytail never spoke anyway. Buzzcut was lost in thought, pacing back and forth in front of the table that held Ushikawa’s body. Except for the moment when he reached the wall and had to turn around, his pace never slackened. His leather shoes were totally silent as they trod upon the cheap, light yellow-green carpeting. As usual, Ponytail staked out a spot near the door and stood there, motionless, legs slightly apart, back straight, staring off at an invisible point in space. He didn’t seem tired or cold, not at all. The only evidence that he was still among the living was an occasional rapid burst of blinks, and the measured white breath that left his mouth.
Earlier that day, a number of people had gathered in that freezing room to discuss the situation. One of Sakigake’s high-ranking members had been on a trip and it had taken a day to get everyone together. The meeting was secret, and they spoke in hushed tones so no one outside could hear. All this time, Ushikawa’s corpse had lain there on the table, like a sample at an industrial machinery convention. Rigor mortis had set in on the corpse, and it would be another three days before that broke and the body was pliable again. Everyone shot the occasional quick glance at the body as they discussed several practical matters.
While they were discussing things there was no sense—even when the talk turned to the deceased—that they were paying respects to him or feeling regret for his passing. The stiff, stocky corpse simply reminded them of certain lessons, and reconfirmed a few reflections on life. Nothing more. Once time has passed, it can’t be taken back. If death brings about any resolution, it’s one that only applies to the deceased. Those sorts of lessons, those sorts of reflections.
What should they do with Ushikawa’s body? They knew the answer before they began. Ushikawa had died of unnatural causes, and if he were discovered, the police would launch an all-out investigation that would inevitably uncover his connection with Sakigake. They couldn’t risk that. As soon as the rigor mortis was gone, they would secretly transport the corpse to the industrial-sized incinerator on the grounds of their compound and dispose of it. Soon it would become nothing but black smoke and white ash. The smoke would be absorbed into the sky, the ash would be spread on the fiel...
"Hard Boiled Wonderland" was the first book of his that I read. It's one of those rare books that while reading it, I find its bizarre concepts leaking into my concept of reality.
Other books that have done that for me include Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" (Conversations continued in my head with the distinct voices of the people I had been speaking to!) and Dave Hutchinson's "Fractured Europe Sequence" series (Wandering through Vondelpark I keep expecting to turn a corner and emerge into another dimension!).
I have to read "Hard Boiled Wonderland" again because I can't remember what it leaked into my reality! :)
Interesting. It's definitely good writing, but a bit florid for my taste.
"Freezing as an icehouse" doesn't really add anything; cold is all that icehouses are (and who has an ice house any more?)
"His stomach was swollen, like an anthill in a field" doesn't really connect for me. To me, anthouses are small affairs, and the big ones I've heard of are uneven, ragged things totally unlike a swollen stomach.
In "questioning, opened eyes", the word "questioning" is too on-the-nose. It's assigning an action to a dead body. It opens an image (that the dead person is doing something) and then immediately drops it.
All of this is English-major/editor stuff -- me explaining why I didn't care for it after the fact. All I knew when reading it was that 1Q84 was an enormous object, and seeing too many adjectives in it makes it feel padded rather than rich.
The sample you give gets significantly better after that, though the meandering paragraph about "Once time has passed, it can't be taken back" is trite. I feel like this has a lot of potential, but also needed an editor.
(To my taste, that is. Sometimes, editors make good books great. Sometimes, they squeeze the life and character out of them. Which is which depends on the editor, the author, and the reader.)
Newport’s “achievements”, as he proudly presents as books, aren’t books but a printed product.
But still, this blog post bears a truth for me. I find it harder to sit down in a calm env. and concentrate on writing code for a prolonged period of time. Partially covid-19, remote work (and my gf) is to blame.
Regarding Murakami, I couldn’t find it interesting enough to finish a book. There are 2 types of fiction writers from my point of view:
1. Clever ones who know what they are writing *in* the process.
2. Writers who figure out what they wrote *after* the process.
I think this is a really wonderful pursuit of a truly worthy endeavor. Now that I have the time and space to do something along those lines myself, if I wanted to, I demur. Software just doesn’t strike me as that same sort of endeavor. You’re either going to just make some horrible person rich, or you’ll make an open source tool/library/whatever which will just indirectly do the same. Whoopdedoo, I’ve already worked to make others rich. (It’s more than this though. Software has also become a gigantic mess.)
Thinking a little longer, it seems wise to focus more on the work itself rather than its ultimate ends. In that regard I think I have just truly tired of software, it feels incredibly stale and futile, and need something else.
But I think this line of thought is what bothers me in the back of my head when I read this deep-work stuff. You can waste your life doing that too, potentially. But along the way you do get to feel superior to people distracting themselves, which I imagine is often some portion of the appeal.
37 comments
[ 474 ms ] story [ 1095 ms ] threadBut no! Instead the point is that he's apparently the only human still able to concentrate properly. Oh well.
And how do you feel about Murakami's works compared to other authors who focus on magical realism? Borges, maybe Gaiman? The genre can sometimes be heavy-handed in leaning on mythology as a narrative shorthand.
Second, Asian literature often seems to follow a "Life continues with or without you" path and the characters may not learn anything and may have been completely bound to their (generally doomed) trajectory from the very start and just resign themselves to their fate.
Some call that deep and meaningful--I call it crap. YMMV.
I apparently am so completely steeped in Aristotelian tradition that I can't stand those kinds of stories. Ted Chiang, in spite of being an American, somehow channels this, and I found I had to force myself through his writing. I have held off on reading Liú Cíxīn because I'm terrified I'm going to bump into the same problem.
I can only recommend these books, among the best I ever read.
In my personal experience being a native speaker of both languages and having read some of his books in both languages, the translators take great care to preserve the reader's experience. I have great respect for their work.
(source: Murakami wrote a couple of essays on his writing career)
Murakami is known for writing in Japanese as-if he was translating himself from English.
He's also the author whose fans most want him to win a Nobel even though his books aren't good enough. He's the ultimate boomer - as a teen real estate prices were so low he somehow ran a jazz bar while in college, and now he writes books about how it's impossible to understand the minds of women.
In my personal opinion he's fairly strong at driving a narrative, but I never get to what end. Like a painter that works extremely hard at a masterpiece to finally pour some gasoline and set it on fire. Compared to an all star like Tolstoy for example he's just not cutting it even a bit.
But I do think too much of his writing is about the narrator meeting a series of mysterious women, not paying them enough attention and then pretending it's an ineffable mystery when they leave him. My favorite of his books is Hard-boiled Wonderland, where this doesn't happen. (There's an anime called Haibane Renmei whose plot is 100% plagiarized from that book.)
Some call that deep and meaningful--I call it crap.
You don't know anything about Asian literature or literature in general.
I am a Bengali, and there are so much deep and profoundly interesting works in Bengali literature alone- I am afraid I am going to have to die before reading all the good stuff.
Although Bengali is 1200 years old, the modern Bengali literature only started about 200 years ago, and due to invasions and political unrest during 1200-1757, there are mot much volume of work of note.
Japan has had political unrest in its history, but it is a more continued (for the lack of a better word) culture. There must be 3x-10x more works in Japanese than Bengali.
And I have left out modern and medieval Urdu literature, and whole of China out of this comment.
The fact that you are putting all of the works- literally tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands pieces of literary art into "Asian literature" bucket and trying to generalize them foolishly shows your utter and complete ignorance in these matters.
Reading this several times (and I will again) gives me the feeling that I am alive, in the most distinct, poetic way without too much sadness nor too much happiness. This book does something very special. I'm so glad it exists.
Well, I had a Sabbatical year and did indeed work on some great stuff, but not having anything on hand at all except writing itself can be quite boring, I discovered.
Didn’t Sol Weintraub do his best writing after his day to day work as a mason? He had ample time to think during the day and wrote at night.
> Neither our economy nor the demands of a live well-lived dictate that everyone should aspire to be sitting alone at a desk in rural Narashino, crafting literature to the light of the rising sun. My growing concern, however, is that such real commitment to thought has become too rare.
With that said generalisations like the one quoted are not substantiated. I don't think real commitment/passion to anything was that popular to begin with if we take the general population. Even historically if we take education levels back then.
In every field there are people that excel, people that go by and people that shouldn't be there. All of these are based on an individual's choice and priority/circumstances. Do I want to be the person that excels and be one of the best in this field or not? Murakami decided he didn't want to be just a writer, but a great one. Whether he succeeded is another matter, but he tried because he could and wanted it. I've read only "South of the Border, West of the Sun" and it was ok, but not really something special (IMHO).
If take this a slightly different way: I think it is common, very common, but that it's normally for some specific thing that isn't fashionable or going to produce a measure of fame. A helluva lot of people are experts at one thing (edit: that they care deeply about and devote huge amounts of time to), it's just "growing unfeasibly large marrows" or "fixing bikes" or "building model railway layouts" or "training dogs" or "cage fighting" or whatever don't have the mystique or social cachet of the underachieving creative who drops everything and isolates themselves to produce award winning novels.
I quite like Deep Work as well, but with this post he seems very taken by romantic ideals of creativity and stereotypes of modern life
It's a dense suburb on the outskirts of Tokyo, just in case anyone was falling for the romantic falsehood this line was selling.
However I still take issue with the original argument of:
> just in case anyone was falling for the romantic falsehood this line was selling.
I don't think it's misrepresented anything. The original comment in the article is:
>Narashino, a small town in the largely rural Chiba Prefecture
Whatever it's population density is, 175k people is still a small town.
The fluorescent light on the ceiling shone down on Ushikawa’s body. The heat was turned off, and a window was open, so the room was as freezing as an icehouse. Several conference tables had been shoved together in the center of the room, and on top of them, Ushikawa lay faceup. He had on winter long johns, and an old blanket was thrown on top of him. Under the blanket, his stomach was swollen, like an anthill in a field. A small piece of cloth covered his questioning, opened eyes—eyes that no one had been able to close. His lips were slightly parted, lips from which no breath or words would ever slip out again. The crown of his head was flatter, and more enigmatic-looking, than it had been while he was alive. Thick, black, frizzy hair—reminiscent of pubic hair—shabbily surrounded that crown.
Buzzcut had on a navy-blue down jacket, while Ponytail was wearing a brown suede rancher’s coat with a fur-trimmed collar. Both were slightly ill-fitting, as if they had hurriedly grabbed them from a limited supply of clothing that happened to be on hand. They were indoors, but their breath was white in the cold. The three of them were the sole occupants of the room. Buzzcut, Ponytail, and Ushikawa. There were three aluminum-sash windows on one wall, near the ceiling, and one of them was wide open to help keep the temperature down. Other than the tables with the body, there was no other furniture. It was an entirely bland, no-nonsense room. Placed there, even a corpse—even Ushikawa’s—looked like a colorless, utilitarian object.
No one was talking. The room was utterly devoid of sound. Buzzcut had a lot to ponder, and Ponytail never spoke anyway. Buzzcut was lost in thought, pacing back and forth in front of the table that held Ushikawa’s body. Except for the moment when he reached the wall and had to turn around, his pace never slackened. His leather shoes were totally silent as they trod upon the cheap, light yellow-green carpeting. As usual, Ponytail staked out a spot near the door and stood there, motionless, legs slightly apart, back straight, staring off at an invisible point in space. He didn’t seem tired or cold, not at all. The only evidence that he was still among the living was an occasional rapid burst of blinks, and the measured white breath that left his mouth.
Earlier that day, a number of people had gathered in that freezing room to discuss the situation. One of Sakigake’s high-ranking members had been on a trip and it had taken a day to get everyone together. The meeting was secret, and they spoke in hushed tones so no one outside could hear. All this time, Ushikawa’s corpse had lain there on the table, like a sample at an industrial machinery convention. Rigor mortis had set in on the corpse, and it would be another three days before that broke and the body was pliable again. Everyone shot the occasional quick glance at the body as they discussed several practical matters.
While they were discussing things there was no sense—even when the talk turned to the deceased—that they were paying respects to him or feeling regret for his passing. The stiff, stocky corpse simply reminded them of certain lessons, and reconfirmed a few reflections on life. Nothing more. Once time has passed, it can’t be taken back. If death brings about any resolution, it’s one that only applies to the deceased. Those sorts of lessons, those sorts of reflections.
What should they do with Ushikawa’s body? They knew the answer before they began. Ushikawa had died of unnatural causes, and if he were discovered, the police would launch an all-out investigation that would inevitably uncover his connection with Sakigake. They couldn’t risk that. As soon as the rigor mortis was gone, they would secretly transport the corpse to the industrial-sized incinerator on the grounds of their compound and dispose of it. Soon it would become nothing but black smoke and white ash. The smoke would be absorbed into the sky, the ash would be spread on the fiel...
And not just because of the subject matter.
While "Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki" is more anime-like, I found "Hard Boiled Wonderland" very full of (unpronounced) deep and profound thoughts.
I found "Sputnik Sweetheart" to be the most original work of art by him.
I am yet to read "Kafka on the Shore", "Wind Up Bird Chronicle", and some of the others.
Other books that have done that for me include Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" (Conversations continued in my head with the distinct voices of the people I had been speaking to!) and Dave Hutchinson's "Fractured Europe Sequence" series (Wandering through Vondelpark I keep expecting to turn a corner and emerge into another dimension!).
I have to read "Hard Boiled Wonderland" again because I can't remember what it leaked into my reality! :)
"Freezing as an icehouse" doesn't really add anything; cold is all that icehouses are (and who has an ice house any more?)
"His stomach was swollen, like an anthill in a field" doesn't really connect for me. To me, anthouses are small affairs, and the big ones I've heard of are uneven, ragged things totally unlike a swollen stomach.
In "questioning, opened eyes", the word "questioning" is too on-the-nose. It's assigning an action to a dead body. It opens an image (that the dead person is doing something) and then immediately drops it.
All of this is English-major/editor stuff -- me explaining why I didn't care for it after the fact. All I knew when reading it was that 1Q84 was an enormous object, and seeing too many adjectives in it makes it feel padded rather than rich.
The sample you give gets significantly better after that, though the meandering paragraph about "Once time has passed, it can't be taken back" is trite. I feel like this has a lot of potential, but also needed an editor.
(To my taste, that is. Sometimes, editors make good books great. Sometimes, they squeeze the life and character out of them. Which is which depends on the editor, the author, and the reader.)
But still, this blog post bears a truth for me. I find it harder to sit down in a calm env. and concentrate on writing code for a prolonged period of time. Partially covid-19, remote work (and my gf) is to blame.
Regarding Murakami, I couldn’t find it interesting enough to finish a book. There are 2 types of fiction writers from my point of view: 1. Clever ones who know what they are writing *in* the process. 2. Writers who figure out what they wrote *after* the process.
And Murakami is the first kind.
I find it hard to parse your intent in saying that. All books fit the definition of "printed product".
Thinking a little longer, it seems wise to focus more on the work itself rather than its ultimate ends. In that regard I think I have just truly tired of software, it feels incredibly stale and futile, and need something else.
But I think this line of thought is what bothers me in the back of my head when I read this deep-work stuff. You can waste your life doing that too, potentially. But along the way you do get to feel superior to people distracting themselves, which I imagine is often some portion of the appeal.