It really was not so long ago, within living memory, in fact, that people did not have televisions. Even so, people had radio (the wireless) and magazines and the cinema, so we were well on the road to cretinization.
But before television people still had to 'make their own entertainment'. Churches, clubs and pubs were centres of social life. Women went to the bingo, men dug their allotments and raced pigeons. In those brief hours of escape from the factory or domestic duties people did things.
Today they seem to do nothing. Even cooking is a chore. When was the last time anyone washed a nappy?
Yet, at the same time we are very busy, cramming every moment with noise and flickering images.
Physical work, like walking, gives us chance to think.
But today we chase the thoughts away. We look for escape, not from drudgery, but from ourselves.
How else can we explain the use of drugs? Not so long ago people smoked cigarettes and drank a few beers, perhaps, but that was all. For the most part people drank to be sociable, and smoked as a little break, like a coffee break, while going about their business.
But now people passively perform their functions, then passively consume. They do not find relief in creativity.
We have learnt passivity and obedience at school, brought up with enough learning to enable us to consume but not to question. Practical skills are scarcely taught at all in schools. Healthy young men and women are chained to the school desk instead of doing and creating.
And when we emerge from our education with our degrees in psychology, criminology and media studies, then what?
Consumption ad nauseam, consumption ad tedium.
We want to escape the hollowness where there once was a heart, escape our purposelessness, where once the meaning of life was obvious.
So we consume more and more, images, noise, food, looking for another thrill to put on the curriculum of 'my life', unable to relate to another human being, because your own experiences are entirely irrelevant to anybody else.
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