6 ms·
Honestly, I spent a lot of my childhood / teen years reading and engaging in other solitary activities and I sometimes feel like my time would have been better
by stuxnet79 10y ago
Honestly, I spent a lot of my childhood / teen years reading and engaging in other solitary activities and I sometimes feel like my time would have been better served trying to connect with my peers. I still read a lot these days, but I just do it with no expectation to derive future benefit from it. Mind you my reading these days is 70% non-fiction. I put reading in the same category of entertainment as TV and video games (FWIW I don't believe either medium sucks compares to literature, and you get out of it what you put in).
Am I alone on this?
- josephjrobison 10y agoTotally agree with his from my own experience. Although I think it's a grass is greener thing. Now that I connect with my peers more often, I long for the solace of focusing on books!
- gambler 10y agoUnpopular opinion time... A lot of written fiction constitutes an intelligent person intently thinking about some subject, drawing upon their experienec and communicating their ideas. This kind of thing happens much more rarely on TV and in video games. And it almost never happens in casual communication. Now, if you buy the increasingly popular notion that ideas and perspectives don't matter, than you're unlikely to derive anything worthwhile out of any medium. I know a lot of people who can't, and for them all the media does look like vacuous entertainment. They read Orwell's 1984 and simply don't get it. They start criticizing its technology or character development and simply don't see the underlying messages.
- skiningham 10y agoNot disagreeing with you, but how do we consume the ideas and perspectives of people who don't write books?
- wry_discontent 10y agoYou definitely can watch tv in a more active way and see underlying themes in most shows, even if they're unintentional.