Original Thought…
I’ve been busy but not busy recently, if you know what I mean. The last couple of weeks have flown by but I don’t really seem to have anything specific to show for it and no real idea exactly where it all went. Next week it’s Thanksgiving here in the USA and then four weeks later it’s Christmas. Someone reminded me yesterday that this year sees the closest distance ever between Thanksgiving and Christmas. An interesting thought. I guess that means it’ll all be over quicker this year. It’s already less than five weeks ’til Christmas and there are just less than six weeks until 2009 hits us with a vengeance.
Many people will be glad to see the back of 2008, a year of recession and election. I have to say it’s been a pretty good year for me personally, so I’m not going to complain. I do hope that 2009 is even better though.
I’ve written a few articles this year about my personal thoughts and some off topic blog items and they have all been well received. It’s nice to know I can write my thoughts down and people actually bother to read them! I myself prefer to read blogs where the content is original and not just recycled from somewhere else. I’ve found that too many blogs nowadays are just pieces culled from another blog and then quoted verbatim. No original thought whatsoever.
What happened to original thought? I personally think its demise is part of the problem in modern day society. People seem to have smaller attention spans nowadays. They just want to know things and know them NOW! No one sits down and reads the printed newspaper every day anymore. No one wants to read a manual or a good book. Even TV programs are made into bite sized chunks and available online to view when you have 22 minutes to spare. Individual music tracks are available to download at $0.99 a time, and movies are a buck a viewing. We’ve become a disposable society with disposable values, living disposable lives in disposable homes, wearing disposable clothes, sending all our waste to any country that has less money than ours that can recycle the waste to make a little money for itself in the hope of becoming the wasteful country itself. Original thought has been sidelined to the few; and even fewer want to read it.
My personal view is that the economy is correcting itself after a few too many years of complacence by those that matter. There are laws to economics, in the same way as there are laws to gravity and motion. Ignore these laws at your peril. Society forgets from time to time that these laws exist and tries to circumvent them in the hope that new laws will be created. Well, guess what, it doesn’t work that way. Abuse the laws of economics and society will have to be corrected. We are in one of those periods now.
When the economy does finally recover it’s going to be like a steam train leaving the station pulling a whole load of wagons. it’s going to take a while to get back up to full speed again. I only hope that this time around the driver is not going to go too fast and come off the rails again.
But like it or not, some things are here to stay. Movie and music downloads aren’t going to go away. Shortened attention spans seem burned into our psyches and reading is only going to become more online-based and less paper-based in the future.
I don’t want to imagine us degenerating into a totally thoughtless disposable society though and so we all need to take stock of ourselves and ask if that’s what we really want. We all have a responsibilty both to ourselves and to our country’s economy. Next time we throw out our disposable pizza box after watching the podcast on ‘Twilight’, while texting to our buddies, we should spare a thought for those citizens of poorer countries that aspire to follow in our footsteps. Is this really the legacy we want to leave them? Is this the example we should be giving?
Lazyness has become a first world disease and it needs stamping out. Original thought and deliberate action needs to be encouraged again. We all hold our future in our own heads. That wonderful amazing thing called a brain is still more advanced than anything mankind has so far built. Now is not the time to get complacent. We are only just beginning that journey to cross unimaginable technological barriers. Let’s show the rest of the world we care about the future we are creating.
At the beginning of this article I wrote that the last two weeks had gone by without much happening, and that it wouldn’t be long before 2009 would be here. Well, guess what, I am fulfilling my own prophecy here! What am I doing about not being lazy, using original thought and deliberate action? Not a lot really. Recession really gets you down doesn’t it? Recession can lead to more and longer recession if we all think this way. Instead, if we can turn ourselves around we can make a bigger, quicker impression. Like I said in an earlier article, now’s the time to start that project you have been talking about. Now’s the time to plan on your future. You’ll never have a better springboard for the future than now, in the depths of a recession. Get ahead before the market catches up. Me? I’ve got a few things on the go that I’ll talk to over the next few weeks. But in the meantime, I’m going to continue writing what I want to write, in the way I want to write it, all in the hope that it encourages at least one person out there to original thought…
