Gen D?

The other night I happened to see some of Adam Hills show on ABC where he, as usual, some rather interesting guests. The Adam Hills on Gordon Street on Wednesday (watch the full episode here) featured the author Alain de Botton. He's written book titles such as Status Anxiety, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work and his latest published work, Religion for Atheists. What interested me was his opening comment "we are the distracted generation". He went on to talk about our constant obsession with our smart phones, constantly having them out and needing to check them even in the middle of face to face conversations with other people. And I just thought that is such a fantastic way to describe our generation. So rarely would I find myself capable of just sitting down and doing only one thing at the one time. I am forever multi-tasking and just generally in capable of concentrating all of my attention on one specific thing. If I'm doing homework I've always got music on in the background or maybe even a movie. If I sit down to actually watch a movie most of the time I will have my laptop in front of me or a notebook nearby. Same when I sit down to watch a TV show. Even when I'm sitting reading a book I sometimes struggle to keep on track with the story as my eyes read the words and my mind is off somewhere else entirely thinking up all sorts of things. The only time I actually just do one thing is when I'm driving. And even then you tend to have the radio on so really your still not only doing one thing. Being time poor forces us to squash everything together or maybe just the fact that there are all these different technologies to use and so many more things that you can be doing that we just don't have time to do that we tend to do so many things at once. Or just trying to do the less enjoyable things with some enjoyment. Sometimes I think it's clever that we can do so much multi-tasking. Sometimes it probably makes us take longer to get things done in the long run as we spend so much time being entirely distracted. Even as I sit here writing my blog my mind is off thinking about the other things I should be doing right now along with watching Tangled on the television. "We [really (or at least if I'm anything to go by as similar to a large amount of the generation)] are the distracted generation".

On an unrelated but nostalgic side note: before I was watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Such a classic film that I'm sure I watched over a hundred times as a child. It's funny though, the things that you didn't notice as a kid that you understand when you watch the film again so much older. All those bits that you found boring when you were little because you just didn't understand what was going on. It's quite funny. Definitely a childhood favourite. In light of this I re-created the wrapper which I will feature in a future blog.