Imagine you are a dreamer. Every night, you have rich and detailed dreams about your best life — you have the ideal partner (or single life), you're wealthy and fulfilled, you have a strong cocktail of varied friends mixed into a great social group, and enough emotional deviations and conflict to keep things from becoming boring. It's perfect, and you're happy there. Imagine waking up each day from those idyllic dreams, retaining all the joy and love and fun you've had in them as you go about your very different reality. It's kind of disappointing, then, this world and its people.

How's (real) life? Are you financially secure, and do you love your job? How often do you see your thriving group of friends, or does that not exist for you? Do you come home to a spacious place filled with the warmth of your loved one? Do you enjoy life? Or would you rather go back to bed?

Television is like a waking dream, the audiovisual contagion that has infected generations of people and fundamentally warped our expectations of life, love, work, and friendship. Every new technology alters the perception of its users over time; that's not a value judgment, but simply a fact. The 2011 anthology series , a kind of Twilight Zone for modern times, is almost entirely focused on this concept, exploring the socioeconomic, psychological, political, and cultural ramifications of mind-altering technology in different ways. In many ways, it's a fictional representation of something its creator, Charlie Brooker, had been satirizing for years.

In fact, the very same year that Black Mirror premiered in the UK, Brooker released a documentary series (on TV, paradoxically) with similar themes: .

"The more we want, the less satisfied we feel," says Brooker in one episode of How TV Ruined Your Life. "Happiness seems perpetually out of reach. Why? Maybe somewhere along the way we actually started believing what this little electronic bullsh*tter was feeding us [...] The basic theory behind aspirational programming is that if you watch beautiful, fun-loving people on TV, you'll somehow feel like they're your friends, when in reality you're just some tramp staring at them from the other side of the room."

As a child, I did childish things: used to try to emulate what I saw on television, as if to manifest it in the real world. In the shows and movies I watched, people seemed so much more... real. They had emotional arcs, they were witty, they were always engaging in new 'situations.' Why didn't my friends speak like Friends? Why did my family seem so banal compared to Family Matters? Why didn't my classmates form groups like Community? When would I start dating and sharing all the deets with a core group of besties, a la How I Met Your Mother? The televisual dream was an unkept promise at best and, at its worst, a manipulative lie.

How TV Ruined Your Life breaks down that lie across six episodes, each dealing with a different manipulative tactic that television utilizes or an aspect of life that it has fundamentally altered. Those episodes are "Fear," "The Lifecycle," "Aspiration," "Love," "Progress," and "Knowledge." The format consists of Brooker narrating over meticulously edited footage of TV series and commercials from the past 60 years or so, occasionally interjected with absurdist sketches to make a point. Brooker appears from time to time on a couch in a room that's filled with the spirit of a hoarder.

The series is part of what I'd call Brooker's audiovisual cultural essays, a cavalcade of shows he's hosted with almost the exact same structure as How TV Ruined Your Life, including Screenwipe, Newswipe, Weekly Wipe, Gameswipe, and his yearly specials. His show You Have Been Watching takes that format and applies it to a panel show with guests, but Brooker has always been a dominant force whose thoughts (and acerbic monologues) shape his shows. All of them are worth watching to different degrees and in different ways, but How TV Ruined Your Life is the only one that feels like it has a thesis, a distillation of all the meandering misanthropy and media critiques of Brooker's work.

When I was older, I realized that my professional life would not recreate the antics and friendships of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, NewsRadio, or The Office (U.S.). Instead, I accepted work as relentless in its tedium, annoying in all its petty, egoic bickering and disagreements, and depressing, a place where we are expendable cogs in a meaningless machine. I would change the channel away from my own life. When people say "follow your dreams," they are referring to television without realizing it. As Brooker says in one episode of How TV Ruined Your Life:

The essential point of How TV Ruined Your Life is that television set expectations way too high and overemphasized many of life's details. It has rewired our brains to be more passive consumers; it has turned humanity into an audience. Ever since television became a babysitter of sorts, and especially since whole TV channels have become devoted to content for younger viewers, our coming-of-age has become less defined by what we do than what we see.

This continues into adulthood. As cultural critic Neil Postman, the only real inheritor of Marshall McLuhan's legacy, wrote in Amusing Ourselves to Death, “How television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged.” The medium is the message, after all.

Television, especially in the age of binge-watching, changes the way we experience the world and compels us to shape it in the image of our favorite shows. The problem is that people just aren't that interesting and life just isn't that good. TV is written and performed by a large collective. It's a simulated fiction that cannot be duplicated, and yet we attempt to simulate the simulation over and over again, just as "new" TV shows simply mimic the form and content of what's come before them.

Certainly, prior technologies and mediums had altered human consciousness. The transition from oratory history to the written word fundamentally altered how we live and remember things, with memory becoming subservient to historical text. Now, reality itself has become subservient to the "text" of television and film, which are much more culturally influential than literature. "Maybe it's us," Brooker says in one episode, pointing to how humanity has always adapted to new technology in, well, the worst ways (and vice versa):

"We seem to have a knack for reducing the most incredible inventions to their basest level, almost overnight. [...] Television, we managed to drag that from I, Claudius to The Jeremy Kyle Show in the blink of a generation. The internet, the most incredible effort at communication ever devised, and we use it for swapping funny photos of cats. Smartphones. With a smartphone, you can browse through the contents of the most incredible art galleries in the world, all in the palm of your hand. Or you could do that, or you can download a novelty app that makes the sound of a farting duck."

It's so much easier to do this with television than with almost any other media. Compared to the more active, or "hot," medium of literature, television is "cold," passive, tribal. Yes, someone in the 19th century could've dreamed of living life like a Jane Austen novel, but when that novel is translated into an audiovisual experience, it's no longer abstract and individualized. It's easier to envy something based on an image rather than a description.

I thought that I was a political subject, that I had agency in society, and that I cared about what was going on in the world around me. This is yet another televisual deception. I may imbibe up-to-the-minute news content every day, but I am only being fed empty calories. I seem to be amassing knowledge and generating roghteous outrage, but I am not doing anything, my passive "participation" in television overriding any kind of praxis and justifying the lack of it by implying that I'm politically conscious. As Brooker says in one episode of How TV Ruined Your Life:

"Today's news often seems to be about nothing but the thrill of the chase, an endless parade of fresh horror piled upon fresh horror, no time for reflection, just pictures. Soon, it all becomes meaningless, which has the side effect of making reality itself feel somehow unreal, like a work of fiction writing itself, a destiny beyond our control, and all we can do is stare at it in stunned desperation."

As the aforementioned Neil Postman (rest in power) writes, “TV news has no intention of suggesting that any story has any implications, for that would require viewers to continue to think about it when it is done and therefore obstruct their attending to the next story.” This is the consequence of transforming news into television, especially in the post-satellite era of 24-hour news. People seek out their cognitive bias, they watch in the background, they pay attention to quibbles and spats between commentators, they post clips on social media, and they see the commercials in between the stories. As Postman writes:

“When news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well-informed.”

“What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation," adds Postman in a bit from his book that feels eerily prescient. "Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information — misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information — information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing.” In an age when decontextualized clips and headlines are the new literature, the multimedia news industry is downright dangerous.

It's especially dangerous when the masters of the medium have ideological intentions beyond their financial ones. Some people behind many media corporations want more than money; they want you to believe what they do, and (until the popularity of social media) there's no better medium to impart ideological messages than television. It creates a political prison in which the bars are invisible. As the O.G. TV critic Marshall McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man:

Television is like a blueprint that's completely different from the building it represents. It's like an instruction manual for something that doesn't exist. It's a mouth-watering menu for food that will never be made. And its malice has spread to social media, which plague the world with false hopes, misinformation, hyperbole, and manipulation. It's depressing because it's better than our lives, but by shaping our brains to perceive reality as something it "should" be, we become incapable of accepting reality as it is.

“No medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are," writes Neil Postman in possibly his most optimistic sentence. I'm not sure if that's true, but if it is, a series like How TV Ruined Your Life is crucial to understanding the dangers of television. It's a kind of deprogramming from a cult that we have all been inducted into without our consent.

And the beautiful thing is, once you start deconstructing the way you've been manipulated by TV, you might start enjoying life itself a little bit more. You might become more open to things, without needing to shape them in the form of neat, lesson-learned situations. You relinquish the self-imposed stress of needing to be attractive, funny, interesting, and memorable all the time.

Life is horrible, but when all you want to do is live inside an impossible dream, life can turn into an outright nightmare. Wake up.