Okay. What’s my job in life? What’s my job as a human being? Well, I would think it’s to learn and to grow. And then, because I am a caring, loving human being as we all are, my job is to give back.
So I must learn and then I give back to my family, my friends, my society. Right? I become over time a knowledgeable person and then eventually, God willing, I become wise. So what do I have to do to acquire this basic knowledge? What?
Well, I have to read. I have to be a reader. And are we reading less? Are we reading less today than we’ve ever read perhaps since the time we actually were literate in the middle of the nineteenth century. The answer is yes.
Profoundly yes. And why? Why? Well, some people say it’s because of time. I just don’t have any time.
I’m too busy. I get up early in the morning. I work all day. I come home at night. I’m tired.
I don’t want to read. Then, of course, we have a shift in perhaps our entertainment preferences. So our family got television when I was six years old, and it was a very strange phenomenon because we didn’t quite know what it was, to be quite honest. We had a good look at it, and we studied it, and we watched some of the programs on it, but it wasn’t really a dominant factor in life. Later, it became so.
Well, I’m 68 years old, so you can see sixty years ago, television was black and white. It wasn’t that dominant. Then, of course, we have a change in educational patterns. We’ve become more digital, a lot more digital. There’s online learning, things along this nature, and then ultimately, the worst curse of all, distraction.
If you have a good look at people’s phones, which I often do when I’m beside them in a mall or perhaps on the scooter or walking, many people are just playing games or just spending their time nonsensically. And and it goes on. In the nineteen nineties, they say that thirty three percent of teenagers actually read the newspaper at least once a day. Today, it’s, gosh, nothing. Maybe two percent.
And only one in three has actually read a book for pleasure in the last year. These are statistics from North America supposedly, but I’m sure it’s the same pretty much everywhere. We are just not reading. Now think to yourself, if I’m not gaining knowledge, am I going to be ultimately free? Am I going to be able to decide where I want to go in my life?
I don’t think so. I really don’t think so. You know, the major work of literature in the Western canon, of course, is the Bible. It’s the basic. Gotta read the Bible.
Everyone knows this. Gotta read the Bible, 66 books in the King James version. Then, of course, we come to perhaps Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace. That’s a tome and a half. Gosh, in the nineteenth century, and then another novel of his, Anna Karenina.
These are part of the basic canon. And, gosh, I ask a lot of people, have you read the bible? Have you read War and Peace? Anna Karenina and many people, most people, and virtually all people in fact, say no. And this should be normal, to be honest, because how are you ever going to be free unless you are knowledgeable?
To do this, you must read. Little story. I’m sitting the other day in a coffee shop in a restaurant, and I look over and there’s a little boy, five or six years old, and I expected to find him on a screen. Basically, he’s reading a book. Mind boggling.
And I walked over eventually and spoke with his parents, and they say they try to avoid the screen if possible. I’m sure the little boy goes to kindergarten, so he’d be exposed to, you know, a screen there or a phone or what have you, but they’re trying to enforce reading, book reading, if you will. Not screen reading, book reading. And I was really taken aback. And I’ve read that many people now are attempting to do this with their children.
Keep them away from the digital nonsense as long as possible. Now, of course, all knowledge is good. It really is. You know? And the point is to say to yourself, I want to learn, and you have to read to learn.
Now there are many ways to read. There’s physical reading. There’s audio books. Right? There’s many different ways, but you got to read if you wanna be free and dictate your own life.
Now I often think that, you know, people such as the incels, the involuntarily celibate crew, if you will, mostly heterosexual white young men. I think many times they end up to be in this position because they don’t know enough. Now, a lot of women today are very sophisticated and they want a sophisticated young man. Obviously, they want somebody who knows something, just not a boor, you know, brain dead, if you will. You know, they want someone of some ideas, imagination.
That’s all from reading. Gosh. Ideas come from obviously other people and other people have written books for thousands of years and we can access these today. It’s wonderful. You know, but God learned to read.
So what I do is I keep track of what I’m reading in my notebook on a daily basis. And I don’t think this is a very original thought at all. Right? I write down what I’m reading and I make a point of constantly reading a book on a daily basis. Whether I go to the gym, an audio book, or I’m at home, a physical book, I try to stay on top of it because very quickly, it slips away essentially into bread and circuses as they used to say in the Roman Empire.
They gave the unwashed. They gave the masses. And these people were citizens and they were free, but they just gave them blind entertainment. They gave them things like the Internet, Netflix, movies, just to pass the time, games. Right?
And all those things are good, but you have to control your intake of knowledge as well. It’s very important if you wanna be free. And, well, you know what they say. You know what they say. Reading is everything.
You meet a reader and you’ll meet an individual of imagination because reading is wonderful. As well as critical thinking. You learn this from reading, don’t you? Because critical thinking is wonderful and critical thinking is great. Truly great. You take care. God bless. Bye bye.