Quote of the Week...from Tony Robbins

We aren't in an information age, we are in an entertainment age.               ---Tony Robbins

Anthony Robbins is a well-known self-improvement guru who has been around for decades.  I read one of his books back in the 1990s, but haven't kept up with him...hope he's doing well.  Back then, Robbins had taken ideas he had heard from other sources and assembled them into a program to help people to be more proactive and take personal responsibility for their own lives.  That's great, I'm all on board with that...but things like the coal-walking ceremony at the end of his seminars?  Well, that's not so "hot"...

I don't know the context of the above quote of Robbins, but I can certainly understand its meaning anyway.  We are living in an age of information explosion, with the Internet making just about any kind of learning available with a few clicks of a mouse.  Yet folks in general seem more interested in using it for entertainment than enlightenment.  When you're out in public and you see someone just staring at their cell phone, they're probably watching sports or a video on YouTube or Facebook...or just scrolling down the latter for provocative posts.  But even if you get offline and just watch television, there are relatively very few channels that are devoted for teaching or information, the overwhelming majority of them being designed to lull the viewer into a complacent state of mental lethargy.  I think it's telling that, concurrent with the just-recent ability to access so much information, there has been an explosion in the popularity of mindless "reality" shows...and one such host even got himself elected president, even with all that has been made public about him.  But human nature being what it is, why should I be surprised that people will opt for entertaining themselves over learning?  I for one like my soccer matches and old reruns...but I also like to watch science and history shows...

I think that the media nowadays goes out of its way to assume that their users have attention deficit disorder and will zone out after a few seconds on a channel or website if they don't somehow get stimulated.  I write relatively short articles on my blog here, but even with their brevity very few seem to have the small amount of concentration needed to get through them.  So if you've made it this far, you're one of the special few left on this planet with anything resembling an attention span...congratulations!