Maybe you find yourself remembering about the days when you’d have to sift through cases of floppies to open a program on your computer, or maybe you remember having to type an essay in Microsoft Office Word ‘98 and hope Windows Me didn’t crash-and-burn (I have mixed memories, experiences, and feelings with that one)… maybe you even remember getting your first car, the ever-boxy Plymouth Reliant (or Dodge Aires). No matter. You think back and you realize “I’m thinking of a simpler time.”, and then you wonder how we ended up from then to now. No, I'm not saying that just because I still use the Gopher protocol and WebCrawler to browse [what used to be] the Information Superhighway. Hell, I’d still even use a dial-up modem, but I guess the lovely song of America Online is relegated to the past unless I want to try to make a telecom grid and ISP in my house… actually, that sounds interesting- I’ll try that at some point.
Still, what I'm getting at is that, a lot of what makes modern society… modern… is also what’s probably going to ruin us. Yeah, I know, I sound like a rambling nutbar, I get that a lot, but my point stands. In a world dominated by the Internet, (supposedly) Artificial Intelligence, and even Virtual Reality, what happens when you just wanna get out with your friends. What happens when you wanna go get lunch, go see a movie? Just anything, really. Put simply, you don’t. We live in a world where, for most people, the act of using your imagination might be a fleeting thing, though I don’t know that for sure. I’ve seen the horror side of it, but I don’t know if there’s a silver lining to it or not… yes, I feel like a hypocrite right about now, but that’s neither here nor there, I believe.
Everyday, we can always say that everything has already been done, has already been invented, already been discovered… the list goes on, but no matter how much we say, think, and live that, it’s never the case. When I write these blogs, I don’t do it in a manner that I’m trying to get to say “Hey, everyone! Look at me! I’m gonna have big things going on one day, maybe, possibly, yeah!”… that phrase isn’t even accurate. When I write my blogs, I’m trying to keep the same mentality that I have when I write my stories or when I say things to people. This is my raw, untapped, uncensored, and unfiltered mind, this is my raw emotion, this is my true beliefs and thoughts on something. Critical thinking is a very-important skill to have, I believe, and I think that, due to the advance of technology, we’ve lost sight of that. Sure, they may gloss over it in school (stateside, they only mentioned it once during my twelve years that I can recall… make what you will of that), but, in school, the ideal student will have a mind that is cloned from the teacher. That might have been a good system to use during the Industrial Revolution, when following directions in a factory was the life to live, but we don’t live in that age anymore. Nothing is about sheer memorization and regurgitation in life, but it also needs a kind of structure that I feel we’ve lost in recent years.
When I started writing, all of my stories took place in the 1990s, and there was several reasons for that, one of which was that it was easier to make a storyline that didn't rely on over-saturation of impossible-to-describe media taking the place of characters’ thinking; it felt like a more real time, even if I was only alive for the very-tail-end of it. Having a more cynical, analytic attitude during that decade was, to some extent, the norm, so a part of the reason was so I would feel less “odd”, but in reality, just having the time period in that setting made it feel more natural to have characters that were actively willing to say “Whoa, hold on. Before you go any further, I want you to stop and tell me where you’re going with this.” and go draw their own conclusions.
My favorite examples of this are when I let some of my close friends take a look at my stuff and then ask “How do you think Aleks is gonna solve this problem?”, which is a somewhat-loaded question, partially because they make me laugh, but also because how I think he’ll handle it in my story is different from how my cousin thinks he’ll handle it in my story is different from how my friend thinks he’ll handle it in the story.
Before the internet grew to become our new home, it wasn’t easy to get just “pulled into” the Internet. Kids could be kids, people could be people… we lived in the world. Earlier, I mentioned how I still use WebCrawler, and the significance of that is that, while I know it’s just a search engine, it’s the oldest search engine online, but also a piece of what the internet used to be. Just simple, basic, a tool. Now, it feels more-and-more like it’s less a tool and more an existence. I know, for a good number of you, that it’s probably wintertime, but ultimately, what I urge you to do, is to log off of the internet, if for only an hour a day, and go experience the rest of the world, even red a book or magazine. Why? It's a good way to stimulate your imagination. You might even consider taking up a new skill, personally, I enjoy piano alongside writing. Really, though, it can be anything, the point is to get you (mostly young people) to use parts of your brains that aren't necessarily well-used. I’m not saying you’re dumb, I’m less than 25 years old, myself, but even simple thought exercises can go a long way. Is it an end-all-be-all solution? No. Can it give you a wider view of the world and help in you’re day-to-day life? Absolutely.
Overall, having your own thought processes and the ability to decide your own worldview is an invaluable ability, and I’d hate to see the day when it is something only found in the history books.
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