Read a book

This is one thing that anybody can do. Anyone of us who can read, can pick up a book and start reading. Rich and not so rich. Young and adult. School going and working. All can do it. It is so easy. It is all available. Still we don’t do it.

All the wisdom, intelligence, learning -everything is there between those book covers. The eons of knowledge -of every imaginable field -it’s all there. Every thinkers’ thought process. Each innovators’ imagination. All is there. So rich and so full of knowledge. Still we don’t do it.

I don’t agree with your point that a sitcom (Friends ) made a mockery of intellectuals, and triggered the downfall of western civilization.

Your ‘Friends’ analogy is a hyperbole, not entirely true. Friends is much much more than what you’ve quoted here. I can debate that. But that is not the point. It is not the point you were trying to make in the first place.

The point is that you got people reading. And I think that is what you started to do in the first place. To make people read on this important topic. And you achieved that. So kudos to you.

You made people to read about this threat lurking on humanity. Facebook is robbing us of our time. And time is something that is most precious yet least cared about.

People today prefer not reading a book and expand the limit of their thinking, widen the horizon of their minds. People don’t prefer learning a new skill, add onto their capabilities, make their life better. People don’t prefer taking a stroll outsides, under the moonlit sky, twinkling with millions of stars and do something that connects them with nature, that makes them happy.

What do they prefer?

Doing Facebook. Mindlessly going through a feed filled with photos and updates of people who are hardly your friends, gawking at what they wore, or ate or where they went to, mindlessly liking (or expressing) them, in a hope they will do the same once they put up a show there.

Studies have shown other people appear happier in those curated photos. Human minds make judgement about their whole lives as being happier in those few seconds shots. And due to the kind of human psychology is, they end up considering themselves worse off.

We end up being more unsatisfied, more unhappy after spending time on Facebook.

Still we prefer going to Facebook —like updates on yet another new set of nude photos of Kim Kardashian, and other such BS news, and end up losing our precious time, losing our precious mental bandwidth.

Studies have also shown that once we are distracted it takes around fifteen to twenty minutes to gain back your lost focus. Fifteen to twenty minutes? In this time span you would have tens of Whatsapp messages, similar number of Facebook updates, a few notifications from the news websites you follow, maybe a few selfies or Instagram updates of wannabe photographers.

To hell with fifteen or twenty minutes, to hell with focus, your life is like walking in a peak-hour rush of a metro-city road, with cars swooshing on both sides of you. You can’t walk even for a few seconds without looking over your shoulder, forget about focusing for fifteen minutes.

The red dot lurking at the top right corner of Facebook -that innocent looking tiny red dot triggers the same region of the brain that many of the serious addictions do. We look at it, refreshing our pages again and again, in hope of the red dot appears there, shows us that we are liked, confirms that we are still relevant.

Ask a Facebook junkie how he or she feels when they put up a photo on Facebook and wait for the notifications. Wait for the likes, and comments. Ask them how they feel when they do get the likes and comments. They are happy, satisfied. And ask them if they don’t get likes there, they feel the same mental deprivation that a conventional addict feels.

Reading a book is the antidote for all this. The long period of reading, analyzing and assimilating its contents. Delving on new experiences through the authors words, the scene that his eyes sees, the sensation that his skin feels, the wisdom that he has gathered through his experiences.

All this is the antidote, which is called Vicarious learning. It is so overlooked yet so important for self-improvement, improvement of this mankind. It is a widely known fact reading helps us become smarter, better thinker, better at solving problems. If nothing at least we become better empathisers. And God knows we need this more of this than anything else, today, in this world.

I fear what damages Facebook has already done. I fear how many potential thinkers and innovators are wasting their time on Facebook right now.