"Most of us spend many hours each week watching celebrated athletes playing in enormous stadiums. Instead of making music, we listen to platinum records cut by millionaire musicians. Instead of making art, we go to admire paintings that brought in the highest bids at the latest auction. We do not run risks acting on our beliefs, but occupy hours each day watching actors who pretend to have adventures, engaged in mock-meaningful action.
This vicarious participation is able to mask, at least temporarily, the underlying emptiness of wasted time. But it is a very pale substitute for attention invested in real challenges. The flow experience that results from the use of skills leads to growth; passive entertainment leads nowhere. Collectively we are wasting each year the equivalent of millions of years of human consciousness. The energy that could be used to focus on complex goals, to provide enjoyable growth, is squandered on patterns of stimulation that only mimic reality."
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
2 comments:
very pale indeed
I feel like we've all said similar statements before. The instant availability of all these distractions is the biggest problem. Without even realizing it, the internet, new and improved television with hundreds of channels, downloading music and movies has led to a lack of appreciation of the abilities we all have as our own individuals. Its a reciprocating relationship we have with our own culture, we've molded it as it's molded us. There's too many distractions and information out there where you can't focus on any one thing, concerted efforts fall by the wayside because it's so easy to turn your eyes on a new sight and the new vision lets you forget what it was you were just looking at. I don't know this is just rants I guess.
K "one love" T
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