Thursday, 19th of November 2020, was a pretty productive day for me. I woke up early, I worked out, ate relatively healthy and I was overall pretty happy with myself. Since I behaved so well, I let myself watch some Netflix at the end of the day so I figured “Hey. I got one episode left from Community. I guess I’ll just finish it now.”
At that moment I already knew I was going to end up sad after watching the finale cause I remembered how I felt the first time I watched it. I did it anyway.
After I finished it, I kind of just stood there… feeling empty as if there is nothing more for me to do in this life. I didn’t know why I felt this way, but I just did. As any other human being wondering what the hell is wrong with them I went on google and typed into the search bar something along the lines of “how to regroup after finishing a show“. I ended up on this Quora post where someone asked “Why am I sad when my favorite tv show ends?” and damn did I feel their pain.
I read a couple of responses from other people and I came to a certain conclusion. Though to be fair my conclusion was mostly what this other guy wrote on there.
Watching a show for a long time makes you develop certain liaisons to the characters in the show. For example, in my case, on some level I felt like Abed or Annie or Jeff or even Britta were my friends so when the show ended, it’s almost as if they just disappeared – to put it lightly. But really it’s more like they actually died. So after you finish the show, you go into a mourning period. A couple hours, days or sometimes even weeks where you just kind of “regroup” as I put it earlier. BUT…
I never actually thought of this before I saw this comment, but somebody in the comment section on Quora said something like “But in this case it’s in a way worse than somebody dying, because at the end of this show you realize that these people that have developed into being your friends or even family are not real”. Reality hits. This is when you realize that they are just not real. I guess in a way we have to stop being Abed sometimes so that we don’t get sucked into the fake world.
Conclusion?
I guess in a way this made me think about the fact that shows and movies are really nice to escape reality, but you have to be careful not making it your reality, because a good piece of cinema can really mess with your mind. And also I need to interact with more IRL people so that when the show ends, I have actual friends and family outside the fictional universe.
August 