Dumbing Me Down

It was a rush to get to work this morning. All the buses were full so I ended up walking part of the way to the station. Then on the train I was sitting next to this stupid woman on a three seater. I was to her left, and she reserved her right for her bag. I don’t know why she didn’t move to the right and put her bag between us to give me more elbow space. I was getting really irritated with her so I opened up my newspaper (propaganda from the Greens) and rested it on her, in the hopes that she’d get pissed off and move up. She didn’t.

Walking to the station after work yesterday, trying to get through the crowds who insist on shuffling as slowly as possible, as if they actually enjoy trudging through the Greenwood Shopping Plaza every day and look forward to reading their daily MX (free newspaper) that always has Anna Nicole Smith on the front, I couldn’t help worrying once again that I’m being dumbed down. I mean, you spend the first 20 or so years of your life being spoon fed concentrated learning and culture, then for the rest of your life it slowly drains away, to be replaced with crap TV, supermarket shopping, mindless web-surfing. It’s like a balance sheet – surely there is only a limited space in your brain for information and memories. After a while, as you collect new experiences, the old ones must drop out like deleted computer files. If your early experiences were quality ones and your recent ones were rubbishy, then the content of your mind must deteriorate, and from there, your personality, conversation and mental abilities. Eg:

New information: Sale at Jacqui E! Hot summer looks 15% off!!!
replaces old information: Pages 1-10 of Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics


When you think of it that way, you can see how the bright young thing you used to be could end up an unimaginative drone whose greatest pleasure is shopping and gossip and who walks very slowly in the station. If only you could choose which memories to retain and which to forget! I resent constantly being exposed to ugliness and mediocrity. The sanctum of my psyche is being violated, rubbish forced in there without my consent.

Hence, my current interest in worthy reading. I hope that if I force some learning into my brain I can do something to hold back the descent into dementia. I know it might seem a bit pointless to spend a quarter of an hour on the bus reading Plato when I about half an hour every day reading the drivel e-mailed by my company’s propaganda department, plus all the other crap I do every day, not if you calculate it minute against minute. But I like to think that a quarter of an hour of Plato is worth more than a quarter of an hour of something else – it’s more concentrated, if you like. For example, a quarter of an hour of philosophy can cancel out an hour of checking my boss’s calendar. Plato is high-strength, whereas diary management is the kind of watery activity that in small enough doses could even wash through the mind with no effect at all. That’s why I feel that in my free time, it’s not enough to read a vaguely good book or watch a reasonably intelligent documentary. The balance sheet requires something stronger to make best use of the time.

God, my job is such a crashing bore sometimes. I’m a bit irritated at the moment. Many of the women who sit near me have the worst screechy Australian accents and they keep calling people on the phone and having loud conversations using business jargon. Life doesn’t get more irritating than that!