I enjoy watching The Chase and Tipping Point, two UK quiz shows and usually do so while doing a 'workout' on the exercise machines we have - bike, rowing machine and step machine.
What often surprises me is the lack of knowledge that contestants have on history, literature, film, geography, science and most things except for sport and modern pop music. It seems that the contestants - particularly the younger ones are 'living in the now'.
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Richard was into 'living in the now' a while back which is probably 'living in the then' now. He was promoting a 'self-help' book about this, maybe this one ...
... to the point where I suspected that it was part of a pyramid selling scheme and he had a garage full of the books and needed to get rid of them. I think that he's over that now and most likely is into reading and living his life following the teachings of Jo Anne Sekowski in her book A Christian Road Map for Women Travelling Alone.
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I get annoyed when contestants fail to answer questions on anything that happened or stemmed from life before the year 2000. "I wasn't born then" they bleat. Well, listen sunshines I wasn't born during WW2, or when Einstein, Leonardo and Beethoven were alive but I still bloody know some things about Winston Churchill, the Theory of Relativity, The Mona Lisa and Beethoven's symphonies. Sheesh!
I get it though, that the rise of social media has coincided with the decline of traditional teaching, reading, reasoning and commonsense and that many younger people's brains are overloaded with billions of 'bytes' of trash. The sheer volume of the shit that they are exposed to on a daily basis is something that we older people never had to endure and process. It's no wonder then that the size of Kim Kardashian's bum or the current love interest of some skanky hip-hop artist is of more interest to them than the origins of the US Constitution, the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century or whose sculpture of David is housed in Florence's Accademia Gallery.
It's a shame though when learning and knowledge is trivialised as I'm damned sure that future generations will be more interested in Michaelangelo's David's bum than any gluteus maximus of some fleeting influencer.
3 comments:
I'll repeat myself - The sheer volume of the shit that they are exposed to on a daily basis is something that we older people never had to endure and process.
Robert, apart from looking up big words and obscure and arcane scientific references on the internet, if you looked at all the 'sheer volume of shit' that exists on Facebook, Twitter and all of the apps young people access you would no doubt agree with me.
Good to see you boys having fun.
That's not something that Jo Anne Sekowski would have said. To be honest, most of the things that she says in her book are a bit like one of Robert's posts after he's been interfered with by the holy spirit at Sunday mass and swallowed a bit of Jesus.
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