Where did the joy of learning things go?

There used to be a time when learning something new meant hours of fun. My parents bought me an Encyclopedia as a birthday gift when I was a kid and I spent hours going through each and every tidbit of information in there. Learning used to be something to look forward to. Now don’t take this post as a vain reminiscence of the bygone days, it is not. It is a written form of the thoughts that I have been having for the past few weeks.

Learning is not fun anymore. You want to learn assembly? Just look it up on the internet. You want to learn how to make some obscure south Indian dish? Look it up. You want to learn about the fifth president of India? Look it up. Every single thing that you may or may not need either right now or in the foreseeable future is available at your fingertips, and I feel like that has taken the fun out of it. There used to be a time when a few friends would argue about some obscure fact that everyone remembered differently, and the discussion would go on for hours! Unless of course a third party intervened, where it turned out that everyone was wrong. There was a joy in small things like that.

For at least the past few years, there has been a lack of things to do, due to the abundance of things to do. The over saturation of information the internet has brought upon us is nothing but an endless stream of information that the human brain sees, processes and forgets. Facts aren’t facts anymore, and opinions of people are changing faster that you can say “frog”. It is a worldwide phenomenon, and it needs to be addressed as soon as possible. Every single person is turning into a clone of every other one due to the saturation and careful feeding of information via internet. Since everyone has most of their experiences online, everyone grows up the same way.

Look at today’s children. They are thrown into the world of internet as soon as they can say baa like sleep to slaughter. They can’t live without phones/tablets. There is no more a need to find things out, because our tech-overlords already do that for us. It pains me to see my nephews or nieces cry out like spoiled children when their phones are taken away from them. Parents encourage this behavior because the child won’t cry if you give them the magic shiny rectangle. This raises some serious concerns about the coming generation.

I used to love computers, I remember writing a substitution cipher GUI program in java using netbeans in school just for fun. I wanted to do it. But for quite some time, it feels like that joy of learning things is gone. I want to sit on a computer only as long as it is necessary and then shut it down. I used to be an avid gamer, I would play video games for hours. Not anymore. Maybe I am growing up, or maybe the circumstances are truly as dire as I think they are, but things are definitely changing. I plan to move away from this overabundance gradually, and I have already started it since the past year by Deleting social media.

Take the first step, Rest is up to you.

Namaskar.