Living In The Age of the Witless
Wit. Witty. Witless. Ah, what a sordid affair it is to pin people under this unsavoury genre. How cruel, that the likes of me have such authority as to partake in a whimsical fancy of classifying humans based solely on opinion! Who am I to meddle with affairs of a larger scale? Oh but I am, I am a somebody, a somebody who cringes at the very existence of this pasquinade of errors that exists at the expense of our immoral intelligence, an intelligence local to the millennial era.
I speak not only of my fellow comrades or of the grandeurs from the “Greatest Generation”, I speak about the mindlessness of what we put out there for others and inevitably for us to sip on, relishing every minute, unaware of how we degenerate.
REGRESSIVE CONTENT, OUR LIFELINE?
Has one ever wondered how the content we inhale is ebbing away or how what we share has receded in intelligence? But then again, as a rule, man is a fool. Following the trend-herd so as to not be left behind. Being a millennial myself, it’s safe to say that my opinion is not invalid. I have grown to terms with the very fact that the world around me has hit a wall. A wall in dire need of being reprimanded, kind of like Trump’s hypothetical one. What I talk about is the content we thrive on -- reality shows, articles with no depth or the overuse of words made ‘special’ by socialites with no claim to fame.
Recently I encountered a group of people who played the ‘like’ trick, dime a dozen times, so much so that I forgot what the argument was about (eventually it turned out to be a discussion on Kylie Jenner’s baby…). What is that you ask? Well, I am sure all of you are aware of the pathetic nature that the word has been reduced to… LIKE is steadily replacing our age old connecting words, throwing them into a darkened abyss. But this was only brought about with the increasing trend of viral content that yes, makes us laugh and yes, controversies give us respite to read about, and yes, is shaving off basic intelligence -- stroke by stroke.
Now, I don’t mean to call every second person one who runs in an array of negative IQ levels, no. I wish to throw light upon the fact that because of a spreading pop-culture that marries only the scandalous and pretty, we somewhere lost essence of true knowledge. I suppose it all started with single women flocking around a stud in micro-minis, trying to convince themselves that said stud is their long lost soulmate, just the seasons and faces seem to change… Coming to what we read about, the content we engulf promotes shady lingo and catchy ‘Signs he’s the one’ know-hows. Most videos are irrelevant to basic life but catch the viral train because they are purely entertaining. If you ask a young teen today who the forefather of our country was or to name the vice-president, I highly doubt they’d be able to recall a name minus the ‘Kardashian’. Is this how we want our future generations to grow? I think not.
YOUR ARGUMENT IS INVALID
If you try to sell your kid to me saying she is an all-rounder and an ace student, that doesn’t quite counter my argument. What has grades got to do with intelligence? And why should we bother ourselves with the gibberish that I talk about?
It is solely because if you pick up the likes of the Economist or TIME, articles there are deemed immaterial to today’s millennial trend, but what we don’t see is that they are most relative to the globe’s trend. They see, they feel, they debate, they click and then they write. Each written line has depth behind it, has logic and argument, is something we must seek actively.
In conclusion, what our generation needs is realisation. Somebody to tell them that what they watch, ain’t always right. It isn’t something to be proud of. In the long run, what stays with us is the knowledge we garnered over years of experience, and if those experiences are wasted away with the likes of reality shows, then what is the point of me writing this article? The window will just be cleared from all aspects.