Welcome to the weekend,
Since reading the Justin Murphy piece linked below, I’ve spent a lot of time this week wondering how many hours television has stolen from time otherwise put to learning or creating. With the ease of entertainment at our fingertips, it seems the default has become simply not embracing opportunities to learn, grow, or otherwise enrich our lives. Instead of working on projects and hobbies, we passively watch television. I speak from my own experience. I’ll always remember realizing a few years ago that the reason I had stopped studying Hebrew was because I signed up for Netflix, and suddenly that was where my evening hours were going.
My experience echoes the stats in this speech;
” [I]f you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project‐‐ every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in‐‐ that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. … And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television.”
Most of us who grew up without or before the Internet’s ubiquity developed hobbies and interests to occupy our minds and time. For the moment, the technology is king because it is so easy to use and to get caught up in. However, there are certainly people tired of constant entertainment, anxious to create something for themselves. I hope that number continues to grow. What if, instead of watching other people work bringing ideas to life, we worked on bringing some of our own to reality?
What if we took even half of our entertainment consuming hours and put them toward creating? What if we spent two hours each day on research, or woodworking, or learning to salsa dance? What might our corner of the world look like? How many Wikipedia projects would exist? The future is infinitely malleable, but it won’t create itself.
Now, the best from around the Internet:
As mentioned, Justin Murphy writes about staying human in an increasingly digital world, or why cultivating human interests remains a competitive advantage. As I’ve shared before, the ability to consistently choose where to spend your attention will become increasingly valuable over the next few decades.
Author and artist Austin Kleon shares “How to Write a Book“.
Seldom-discussed techniques for evaluating character.
Which books from the 1990s are being taught in U.S. schools and universities today? As the authors point out, many books taught today weren’t necessarily best-sellers upon release, but have been advocated for by educators because of what the book says about a conflict or culture. Over time, those books become cultural forces. Although, given that trajectory, I was surprised by the number of titles I hadn’t heard of.
How to read Finnegan’s Wake in seventeen years, which is the number of years it took Joyce to write it. Sounds like a plan.
Currently reading: The Narnian by Alan Jacobs
Have a creative weekend.
Image: Croegaert, Georges. Taking Tea, 1848 – 1923.
