I saw this video by Nature Valley about a week ago, where 3 generations were asked what they do for fun. The older men and women went blueberry picking, fishing, and playing in the snow. Another man and woman recounted how they went outside to play baseball and built forts with their friends. It all sounded like so much fun.
When the younger generation was asked the same question, it felt pretty disappointing. They played video games, fiddled with their smart phones, texted their friends, watched videos for hours on end. They always feel better when they're on their phones tablets or with their video games.
It saddens me how they may be missing out on other things, like the real world, real interaction with their friends, getting out there with some physical activity. They're pretty much contented sitting around in the house with all these gadgets.
It just seems so sad.
One of my favorite things to do as a kid was go out on bike rides. I would impatiently wait for the time I would be allowed to go out on afternoons after school, when the air was cooler. Sure, I was only allowed to go up and down my street within the boundaries of the speed bumps, but I didn't care. My bike may have training wheels, but I didn't mind as well. My brother sometimes joined me with his bigger bike, and had the liberty of going around the block to the other streets. Eventually my brother took out the training wheels from my bike, and I managed to learn to ride it without them.
When my cousins moved into the same village a few years later, afternoons were still spent on bikes, riding back and forth between our houses, and then hanging out in the park at the end of their street. My cousin Ate Shang and I would play on the swings until it grew dark and I had to be called to come back home.
Does anyone still enjoy doing that now as much as I do? I still have a bike that I take for a ride during cooler afternoons, just going around the village, chasing the sunset and meeting up with friends who live nearby. We would hang out at our favorite coffee and tea shops and talked for hours on end.
Sometimes I forget how people can be so attached to technology, especially now. Everything comes easy now, more so in communication. So yes, it has made communication so easy and convenient. You can easily contact someone via a text message, chat message, or email. But most people can just be seen looking down on their phones instead of carrying on an actual conversation with the people who are right in front of them.
I miss the times when I would write long handwritten letters to my friends I had just seen the day before and even will be seeing the next day anyway. I also take pleasure in reading and writing letters, exchanging them with friends that I haven't seen in a long time.
Then there were those long conversations over the landline which last for hours into the night, and sometimes well into the morning. It also included the thrill and anticipation as to who will be on the other line when you answer the phone, or the sheer nervousness when you call a friend and their parents answer the phone.
Is the sincere art of conversation dying as well?
It's always a treat when I get to sit down with a friend over coffee just talking about anything under the sun. But then sometimes, with most people, at the first lull in the conversation, cellphones would be taken out, checking for text messages, chat messages, or even just notifications from various social media platforms. It would be what I call patay-chika. I sometimes say it as a joke when I find my friends doing so, but sometimes I say it seriously but with a light tone so as not to put them off. It's pretty awkward when I would carry on a conversation while someone whips out their phone, and then they would drastically change the subject just because of something they see there. This mostly applies to my sanguine friends. Uhm... so what were we talking about again?
What is it with these gadgets that we can't seem to function without them? That we feel so crippled without an internet connection? We get so obsessed with digital conversations that we sometimes ignore actual human personal connection.
Let's meet up for coffee or something sometime. The only patay-chika things that I'll be bringing are the current book that I'm reading and my journal, but count on me to engage in conversation with you for as long as you want, minus the gadgets.
Let's talk, my friend.
No comments:
Post a Comment