If your parents or grandparents ask you how to post on Instagram or how to send a birthday message to a Facebook friend, a new study suggests you might want to help them -- not just to be nice but because getting them online may help their brain health, too.
Finding new ways to dunk on libs and chuds online, will help you reduce the risk of dementia!
anecdotally, i think there's something to what you're saying. there's a guy my age that i have known since we were 15. we worked together in our 20s and 30s. and now we're in our 40s. he was always extremely bright and absolutely the more intelligent of us, but starting in his middle 30s, he went back to just watching TV. cable news and entertainment. i tried to show him how streaming devices work, and he would always say "nah, this is fine." and it was very much coming from a place of just wanting to have something to sit in front of passively. i would see him less and less (once a year) or talk on the phone a few times a year, and the decline was palpable.
eventually it got to the point he would never have anything original to say about anything, even more accessible stuff like mass culture critique or deconstruction. just a bunch of lukewarm takes that could be summed up as a set of editorial bullet points and a general confused cynicism about US decline and a disavowal of doing anything about it... while of course dismissing my passion for basic human rights and material analysis as some kind of naive eccentricity. this is not who he was 10-15 years ago. he used to read constantly, embrace humanism, and be creative. now he's like the poster child for stagnation.
I got into an argument about I think the Flint water crisis years ago with an acquaintance on FB who told me that I needed to just stop caring about other people.
anecdotally, i think there's something to what you're saying. there's a guy my age that i have known since we were 15. we worked together in our 20s and 30s. and now we're in our 40s. he was always extremely bright and absolutely the more intelligent of us, but starting in his middle 30s, he went back to just watching TV. cable news and entertainment. i tried to show him how streaming devices work, and he would always say "nah, this is fine." and it was very much coming from a place of just wanting to have something to sit in front of passively. i would see him less and less (once a year) or talk on the phone a few times a year, and the decline was palpable.
eventually it got to the point he would never have anything original to say about anything, even more accessible stuff like mass culture critique or deconstruction. just a bunch of lukewarm takes that could be summed up as a set of editorial bullet points and a general confused cynicism about US decline and a disavowal of doing anything about it... while of course dismissing my passion for basic human rights and material analysis as some kind of naive eccentricity. this is not who he was 10-15 years ago. he used to read constantly, embrace humanism, and be creative. now he's like the poster child for stagnation.
:agony-acid:
I got into an argument about I think the Flint water crisis years ago with an acquaintance on FB who told me that I needed to just stop caring about other people.