I am watching ‘This is us’ at the moment, an American drama TV show. To be honest I wasn’t so convinced about starting to watch it, friends had told me good things about it (and it got 8.7 on IMDB!), but I thought it was going to be very sappy. And it is. But it’s also very addictive. Now that I am at the beginning of season 3, and I have spent hours watching moving scenes of a perfect happy-family-with-imperfections sharing deeply emotional moments, I wonder if feeling emotional about life or family bonds as a result of watching drama is enough to make us change. I will explain myself better. While watching an emotional scene, for instance about a couple talking about how to raise their kids, we might feel emotional, we might feel “I want the same”, or “ I should improve the communication with my husband”, and so on. We might identify with the character. We might cry when someone dies or when they have a big fight. But are these emotional scenes just good to make us cry a bit for something else than our own pain? Like a simple distraction from our own drama? Or can they really improve our relationship with our families and friends, our way of thinking, or the way we educate our children? Is it enough to see a perfect family on TV to do the same and go on building a copycat one on our own?
Another thought brought up to me by this TV show. At some point one of the main characters says to his wife while talking about their kids; “we are their parents, we do the best we can, but at the end of the day what happens to them, how they turn out, it’s bigger than us”. Is it? I have always wondered how much it’s in the parents’ hands and how much is in the hands of ‘fate’? Or the social environment? Or society? Or the education system?
Blabbering of a millennial 