Out of my way! There are Deals to be had!
This is a follow up story to my post last year – Let’s Celebrate BUY NOTHING Friday, Instead of Black Friday, Don’t We Have Enough Stuff?
In these modern times, where “40s’ the new 30”, and botox has become the norm (even for men), I can’t help but wonder where it all went wrong. We seem to be living incorrectly, and ‘modern times’ seems more synonymous with ‘poor judgment’ than the ‘scientific enlightened’ society one would expect. The latest example of this is how shopping has become the focal point of the thanksgiving holiday, and not just in the US. It is so pronounced now, that ‘Black Friday’ has now extended it’s boundaries to include thanksgiving day, so now Thursday is a shopping day as well.
Hooray!
The key now for thanksgiving, as sad as it sounds, is to eat fast, and spend as little time with the family as possible, so you can beat out your fellow man to buy more gadgets and tablets and iphones and computers and ……….. well you get the point. The irony is these great devices will be used, once unboxed, to communicate with the very family you left in the dust hours earlier, using the latest and greatest ‘social media’ craze. As we all now know, and fully understand, connecting through social media is far more rewarding than connecting in the real world, in person.
Right?
Now don’t get me wrong, I like my gadgets, and I love staying connected online, but I feel, that at some level, this type of ‘isolated connectedness’ is detrimental due to our very social nature. And I know they call it ‘social media’ and you do connect with people, but it isn’t the type of ‘social’ our species evolved with. Connecting through keystrokes is far removed from the typical types of human interactions and connections of only a decade ago. I was at the dentist today, and while I was waiting to be called in, I looked around the room and everyone was on their phone, thumbs typing away, eye’s glued to the little screen in front of them. This is the new norm in these ‘modern times’. No matter where you go, most people are clicking away on their smartphones, trying to keep up with all the ‘goings-on’ on the world wide web. Again, I can’t say for certain whether this is a good or a bad thing, but lately I am leaning towards the latter.
But something I definitely do know is bad – and yes I know it is a little off topic – is the fact that the US House of Representatives passed a bill that protects the status of Pizza in US schools as a vegetable! No joke. Read about it here:
http://www.lifeofbrian.ca/index.php/2011/11/pizza-is-deemed-a-vegetable-for-us-students/