Some sentences just stick with you.<\/p>\n
I never forgot the following quote from an assigned reading in college. Years later, I would discover the author of the quote, Columbia University Professor Jacques Barzun, also wrote my favorite book on research:<\/p>\n
\u201cFictional life is so much harder to live than actual life that most people would wither away in the rich atmosphere of Hamlet or Mr. Pickwick.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Fiction\u2014written and filmed\u2014was such a big part of my youth, I often forgot it was not actual life. That\u2019s why Barzun\u2019s idea struck me back in film school. I didn\u2019t agree with it. I thought fiction had a greater presence in our lives than the Professor gave it credit.<\/p>\n I pursued two art degrees because I believe the arts are nothing less than human-directed evolution. When an artist and audience collectively select a work as a \u201cmasterpiece,\u201d it becomes a doorway. It may take time for everyone to step through that door, but once we do, the species enters a new understanding of the world and thus, a new world.<\/p>\n All of us today live within Shakespeare\u2019s and Dickens\u2019 richer atmospheres. Shakespeare woke the groundlings to the drama in their human relationships. Dickens woke his readers to the morality, or lack of it, in their lives.<\/p>\n We are different than our ancestors because of extraordinary individuals, groups, and their works. We are also more anxious.<\/p>\n I wrote about how smartphones and digital cameras can either strengthen sight or replace it<\/a> just like a calculator can advance our math skills or do the work for us. The decision to use a tool to improve or weaken our muscles always rests in the individual.<\/p>\n We can\u2019t go back to a time before the iPhone, and we shouldn\u2019t want to go back. It\u2019s another threshold we stepped across collectively because we saw the benefits and knew we could solve the problems.<\/p>\n Our growing anxiety is a product of greater cognition and metacognition. I\u2019ve also written about our growing levels of mindfulness<\/a>. We ask modern children to think on multiple levels, and to question everything, even their dearest foundations and beliefs. It\u2019s unprecedented and arduous and far more than we\u2019ve asked any generation previous.<\/p>\n Today\u2019s New York City would strike dumb any of Dicken\u2019s Victorian Londoners with its choices and freedoms, never mind an Elizabethan like Hamlet.<\/p>\n America, and its culture of checks and balances and diversity, has little in common with any foreign nation with a history of tradition and a homogenous people. As I just wrote about America, we troll ourselves<\/a>, often too much.<\/p>\n Look at this footage of old New York<\/a>.<\/p>\n Our ancestors, in their dapper suits and dresses, were wrapped up tighter than an Apple product. Even the villains who bombed Wall Street in 1920<\/a> no doubt wore lapels and bowlers. People just weren\u2019t exposed to the amounts of nonconformity and creativity that exist today.<\/p>\n Yet those same people in New York were a new people, made of nations the world over. Their diverse mixing still produces most of the world\u2019s Nobel Prize winners<\/a>.<\/p>\n Though their improved knowledge exists right now, about our minds, bodies, societies, and actions, the conversations online reveal how little has penetrated the average life. People still believe in an \u201ceye for an eye\u201d or that \u201cseeing is believing.<\/a>\u201d It takes a while for everyone to get through the doors.<\/p>\n I expect how unevenly we progress has a lot to do with our anxieties as well.<\/p>\n