The problem of professionalization and depersonalization is, for me at least, most vividly on display in social behavior.
Ken mentioned in Pt 1 that kids these days have at their disposal so many more resources that most people reading this might have. I wonder whether or not this is a good thing.
don’t get all worked up, I’m not saying we should deprive our children of every advantage our society has developed and built.
But what about the things that are not truly advantages? Clearest to me is the video console. Never before in the history of Mankind has there been a device that encouraged solitude and self-modifying behavior. Whittling is as close as I can come up with insofar as other hobbies or pastimes that have not been group activities in the past, but whittling was never really that rewarding and so people either got bored with it or became sculptors, neither of which is a bad solution.
But in the modern context, we have so many things that kids can do, so many activities, so many inputs that there is almost no time in which they are bored. They may say that they’re bored, but as often as not they are seeking a new disc for the game cube or something because the game has become boring, or their movie collection has become boring, or their computer is too slow or whatever. That’s not boredom, that’s just deprivation of instant input.
No, I’m talking about real boredom. Take away the video console, no soccer, no tv no internet for a week and inspire some real boredom and see what happens. Probably nothing other than your life becoming a living hell. And that’s the problem. With so many different avenues of individual entertainment, pick-up games of soccer or basketball, common on the playgrounds and fields of my youth, have all but disappeared. They have been replaced by leagues, this is true, but then it begins to edge out of the realm of play and into sport and it isn’t so much a cure for boredom as it is a way to fill the time between school and dinner, between dinner and sleep, between Friday and Monday. It has preempted boredom.
But what’s wrong with boredom?
The constant barrage of input, the amazing spectrum of scheduled events, the wealth of possibilities is truly the blessing of an advanced society with wealth that would make Solomon blush and yet, so much of it leads us into pursuits that fill our time without bringing us much closer to the people around us, even teammates because the activity is the point not the creative, corporate dispelling of boredom or the spontaneous creation of community.
I think that the most glaring example of too much input and not enough society is the frequency with which I see young people riding around with their parents, staring out the windows of the car with the ubiquitous white wires from their ipods hanging from their ears. Two people sharing a small space, bound by love and family, not interacting at all.
We’re losing touch with each other as much as we’re losing touch with the unseemly bits of the life that we lead. We were made in the image of God for community, mutual support and loving communion with one another and we are fracturing, idividualizing and becoming distanced from one another in an effort to become all that we can be as individuals, without seeing that we were meant to be all that we can be, together.
