An Unexamined Life

"The unexamined life is not worth living" - Socrates.

Imagine that you are not allowed to think for yourself. Also try to imagine a scenario where you are too distracted to think for yourself. If you are not sure what I mean, watch this short clip of the Pixar movie, WALL-E. Ancient Greek philosophers like Socrates and Plato suffered from the former. Poor Socrates was sentenced to death for thinking and believing something outside of the norm.

I think we are beginning to succumb to the latter. We live in a fast-paced world with many distractions. We literally have an endless supply of cheap entertainment at our disposal. Perhaps one day, all of our work will be automated and we'll end up like people in the spaceship like in the clip below. Without any responsibility whatsoever, what will we choose to do?

Many Greek philosophers had a lot of free time because they were higher class citizens with fewer responsibilities. They chose to spend their time reflecting and think critically about life. They didn't have things like Netflix. What if they did? Would we have the Socratic method? I'm not so sure.

This is a direct tie-in to my previous post about binge-watching TV shows and scanning headline news. I see it in myself and almost everyone I know. We're not reflecting anymore. Reflection is key. We're surfing along at high-speed, being entertained, missing the finer details of life, not thinking for ourselves.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with watching a movie or TV show - if it's in moderation. To binge, in my opinion is inherently unhealthy. We need to slow it down. Capture the details. Do something else. Investigate and fact check what you are reading or watching. Take nothing at face value. Don't become a robot or a sheep.

Slow down, live your life, and think for yourself.

Binge-worthy

With the age of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video - we have endless ways of being entertained. Netflix even has a TV show category called, "Binge worthy" shows. They are usually quite addicting and before we know it, we've spent the whole night in front of the TV or whichever device you happen to be using.

Besides entertainment, what are we getting out of this? Perhaps if it happens to be something educational, we might be learning something - but how often do you binge-watch something like this? I admit I binge-watched The Cosmos, which was narrated by the ever-famous astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson. I enjoyed it and I learned a lot, but unfortunately I don't remember much from it.

Imagine the days when we had only books. Unless you were an editor, librarian, or book lover, you probably wouldn't have binge-read. But if we did, I think we'd be better off because reading takes your time and focus. By the time you are done reading the book you'd probably have a lot more to say about it than if you had just finished a TV series.

I don't very much enjoy my conversations with people when we talk about our latest binge-watching adventure. Why? Because it's usually short-lived and shallow. Here's how it usually goes: "Hey, did you see that last season of Game of Thrones?" "Yeah, it was insane! I can't believe this person died" "Did you see the last season of so and so?" "Yeah, I can't believe so and so happened". Just like that, we switched the conversation to a different, completely unrelated show. I can't stand it. I also find this very disturbing.

It's not just binge-watching TV shows that shares this shallow consumption of the media today... it's headline news, Tweets, etc.

This is why we had to write book reports in grammar school... to remember and learn from what we read!