A Little Elsewhere

Some days, you want someone to tell you a story that has nothing to do with you.

You’ve made enough decisions. There’s something in the house that needs fixing, a message you haven’t answered, and a conversation you’re going to have to finish eventually.

You’d just like to spend a little time thinking about something else.

So you buy a ticket. Open a book. Watch someone on TikTok play all four people in a painfully familiar office meeting.

For a little while, somebody else is responsible for what happens next.

“The noblest art is that of making others happy” is attributed to P.T. Barnum. Though he wasn't a noble man, the thought offers a standard worth considering.

Make someone happy.

Give them something to look forward to.

Let them feel something different than whatever today offered.

That seems like a worthwhile thing to make.

In marketing, we talk about creating demand as though the audience arrives empty and a sufficiently clever person puts a desire inside them.

Write the right headline. Make the right promise. Conceal just enough to make someone need to know what’s behind the curtain.

A movie trailer can make you care about a story you hadn’t heard of two minutes earlier. The first sentence of an essay can leave you wanting the second.

But the desire underneath was there before the invitation.

People want an escape. From responsibility. From the same problems. From hard.

Art, writing, movies, theater, even a ridiculous sketch watched on a phone can give someone a few minutes they’re glad they had.

And then we call it “just” entertainment.

That’s where the ambition in Barnum’s sentence belongs: in what another person receives.

Because after a movie, maybe someone turns to the person beside them and repeats the line that made them laugh. They get it slightly wrong, but they both laugh.

You made that part of their evening possible.