It occurred to me one of the primary social detriments to universal device addiction is that it builds habits of passivity, complacency, and conformity.
Children need to play. They need to run around like little crazy people, laughing and screaming, and within reason need to be allowed to do so by their parents. They need time to do this, and place to do this, like playgrounds.
It’s hard to gauge the emotional damage being done, locking so many children in their homes, but it must be substantial. And given that kids neither get this disease nor spread it, it is really inexcusable, like the rest of this clusterfuck.
But I have long noticed this seeming passivity. Young adults have been turned into groups of eyes, watching, waiting. They respond positively to the first person who tells them what to do. They have been consuming, consuming, consuming information and content and directions since the earliest childhood.
You can’t build a sense of self without some robust interaction with your environment, and that happens in conditions of play.
And it occurs to me that the process of helpful, functional, adaptive, optimal maturation involves learning how to play within the context of meeting adult responsibilities. They are not mutually exclusive. There is nothing about being an adult that requires you to stop laughing, stop kidding around, and stop having fun. In fact, all the above probably make you a better worker, better lover, better spouse, better parent, and help you live longer.
I watched an interview with RFK, Jr., who has adopted a much more visible face in recent days, although he has been heavily involved in dealing with water pollution and vaccines for some time, where he commented that IQ points seem to have dropped nearly a standard deviation–7 points–in the past 40 years or so. I think our food is less nourishing and filled with potentially toxic things like steroids, GMO food–both directly, and as fed to our animals–and cheap fillers. Harvard showed that fluoride in the water also makes kids stupider.
But I have to wonder if the sheer volume of TV kids watch, and now smart phones and tablets and the like, which stand in for play, which stand in for running around and being crazy, don’t play a role in all this.
I don’t think you can be truly rational without being physically balanced. I think the health of our thoughts, our emotions and our bodies are all tied together.
Actually, come to think of it, my youngest read something saying that kids nowadays often lack the ability physically to negotiate uneven surfaces, or at least they are relatively impaired compared to previous generations.
It seems reasonable to suppose that overall intelligence–understood as a sort of perceiving Gestalt consisting in common sense, reasoning ability, emotional perceptiveness, and physical awareness–emerges from constant and mutable “shocks” or changes in the environment. You need new ideas, problems to solve, exercise in philosophy, a range of emotional experiences and stimuli, and varying physical tasks.
Moshe Feldekrais coined the term “acture” to describe the dynamic way we interact with the world. He meant physically, mostly, but it was clear that he well understood that the way we move physically is affected by, and affects, how we feel and think. In some respects his system is intended to retrain–or perhaps release from its fetters–the mind by retraining the body.
I would suspect that most Antifa members have characteristic ways of moving. They rigid in mind, rigid in emotion, and even if they are physically flexible–doing yoga for example–the movement AS EXPRESSED in acts as simple was walking down the street likely show their dogmatism physically, for those with the eyes to see.
Yet one more creepy thing about the modern era is the advent of “gait analysis”, which is intended to supplement and perhaps replace facial recognition. But the gist is that we are all fucked up in subtle but unique ways, which reflect in how we walk. Feldenkrais commented that perfectly well adjusted people, with no neuroticism at all, would all walk the same way. But we don’t.
If we survive this crunch time with our freedoms, prosperity and dignity intact, then we really need a national conversation on child rearing. Our children REALLY ARE the future. But they are treated as disposable cogs in a machine if they get in the way of any dogmatism, which most usually comes from the Left. Kids do not thrive in single parent homes, in general. We know this. But it is politically inconvenient for those pushing policies which make single parent homes more likely. On the one hand they destroy the black community, and on the other decry the “racism” that they want to blame the following problems on. It’s unconscionable.
As a short list, it seems obvious kids need–and these are evolutionary requirements–an attuned mother; a present father; a sense of physical safety; the freedom to play, venture, risk and occasionally get a bit hurt; playmates; and the sense that as they mature they will be entering a culture which is coherent, with rules that are emotionally nurturing and comprehensible. If some or all of these things are not present, they will be unhappy.
And I will wonder too if the latent message of internet addiction is that “the answer” is “out there” rather than “in here”. I myself spend too much time on the internet, but a good percentage of it, for me, is spent writing and creating. This blog is the most obvious, but not the only example. That is a very different experience than consuming and watching, which I do relatively little of.