There’s a whole well-known tendency among creative types to be avid consumers as well as producers of media. Painters go to galleries, directors watch movies, writers read books. If there’s money involved then doing so is even potentially claimable as a business expense for your taxes. Imagine my jealousy of my buddy who is a professional video game developer…

But I don’t think consuming entertainment like this is just “homework” or whatever you’d want to call it. Entertainment is supposed to be entertaining, right? Even when you’re the one producing it for others you should ideally be doing so out of love and joy, much less when it’s your own relax time. That ideal isn’t always lived up to where job and hobby overlap, but there ought to be some of that escapism element we all crave with storytelling, both for listener and teller. Arguably it should be even more escapist for the creator despite them having to deal with all the niggling nuts and bolts of putting things together… or maybe because of it? Presuming they are able to keep their heads down and block out the real world for a time.

If you’re someone like Stephen Colbert, welp, sorry, what’s happening in the world is something you have to stay wrapped up in even though you’re presenting it in a comedic fashion. That’s what you signed up for. But Colbert never has more of a true gleam in his eye than when he gets to nerd out over J.R.R. Tolkien on the air. Creatives of his ilk might well want to go home at the end of the day and have nothing to do with current events until they get back to the writer’s room. Or maybe they still do, but can frame it in a different context as a viewer.

Something a lot of folks don’t consider is that their therapist might very well have a therapist. Someone to talk to in confidentiality and perhaps unload all of the stress they’ve dealt with from helping other people. And that therapist might have a therapist, and so on… it’s not a situation so far as I know where there’s a Grand High Therapist somewhere and all therapy begins and ends with them. So it may be with the media artist whose career (or semi-career) could be homework, job, therapy and escapism all at once. And whatever they create in turn might help others with the same.