Life by a thousand cuts

It's not all doom and gloom, after all. Or is it? Kids no longer play by themselves in the streets of most western cities, lovers spend time copious amounts of time looking at their phone instead of gazing at each other adoringly, emoticons and gifs have replaced emotional exchanges of words. Families and friends, united by devices. So what? Digital natives have not been left with a huge void in their lives and the non-digital generation should not fear their offspring is going to grow into some mutated half-VR creature. If anything, there is currently too much choice, a sure source of neurosis. Shall I do this or shall I do that? Go on Twitter or Reddit? Post something on Facebook or Instagram? Actually the latter dilemma has been solved, as you can post on both at the same time. It is true that parenting is now much harder than it used to be 30 years ago, when the framework of daily life was pretty fixed. There was no escape from the physical confines, so any venturing ou

Absence of writing makes the blogger go rusty. It dissolves whatever crystals of an idea were around in the first place and it turns the writer back into a reader. A reader only, must add. I don't know much about the origins of consumerism in the wider society, I can only bear witness to the straight path that leads to culture consumerism. Having intelligent, creative, funny or plain well-educated thoughts for breakfast, lunch and dinner is great. The problem is that they are always someone else's thoughts, in one format or another. If you don't like analogies, stop reading now. Reading and watching TV or videos is like eating other people's food, all the time, in select restaurants. Delicious food, combined with lack of effort, in preparing it, is almost impossible to resist.  It is a wonderful past time and it empowers anyone to have delightful conversations. The would-be writer can get tempted like everyone else. It's only human, after all, to go after p