Spectating is Good for your Soul

Sport is ancient, online videos are modern, but both have millions of people watching them.

It's easy to find negative things to say about spectators (the word itself even used as a negative description at times) because there are so many things where you could say that more people should be helping out with the work required in the world.

However there is a positive side to spectating the achievements of others.

C. S. Lewis once wrote in my favourite book 'The Screwtape Letters' that God wants human to able to celebrate their own achievements as much (but no more than) as if the same thing had been achieved by somebody else. If an architect looks at an impressively constructed monument, he should celebrate it's beauty the same regardless or whether it was designed by himself or a different architect.

Lewis wrote this as an explanation for how God wants our hearts to move away from pride, but his imagary also highlights for me the benefit of spectating. When you watch sports, you are practising the simple yet important action of celebrating others achievements. The more practised we become at that, the easier it should be for us to balance our humility in the way God intends.

There's nothing wrong with joy in your own success, and spectating is healthy because it keeps you well practised at taking joy in the success of others.

Social Media and Intimacy

Talking with people face-to-face is a rarity today. As more of our friendships and relationships are maintained online, there are understandable questions about whether being "friends" means what it used to mean only a generation ago.

One of the interesting phenomenon that our culture became aware of quite quickly in social media was the apparent contradiction that a person with hundreds of "friends" online could feel extremely lonely. This has generally been explained by saying that our friendships on the internet are more superficial, or shallower, and that a person who only invests themselves in online friendships will miss the depth of those found in real life.

Games: Console vs. Cardboard

When I was growing up, I never had a console, but our family had a computer, and that was enough for me to spend many hours playing electronic games. Now that I'm an adult, I'm only mildly surprised that it is acceptable for adults to play video games, too. I have moved on from video games, but not from games in general; instead, I've become a player (and collector) of modern board games.

Knowing How the Story Ends

I think that it isn't such a bad thing to know how a story goes before you read or watch it.

This goes against one of the main methods Hollywood uses to keep making money, because one of the most common reasons people choose to watch a film is that they want to know the story. What happens? How does it end? This is particularly true of sequels where the audience has already been emotionally hooked to one or more characters.

Good Characters Make Bad Sequels

Most movie sequels seem to be worse than the original films that they follow. Why is this normal? You might think that films should get better as film makers re-use only the best material and ideas.

A sequel would only be made if the first movie was considered successful and popular, and a movie is only very successful and popular if it has good characters.

Art vs. Self Expression

It seems like everyone has an opinion on art, but that most discussions on the subject end in the fashionable question "what is art?" and then the politically correct statement that "anything can be art", which is the same as saying that nothing is. If I invent a new adjective, and say that everything can be described with this word, then I have invented a useless word that doesn't actually mean anything helpful.

My own idea is that Art should be made a separate category from Self Expression. I would suggest that real Art does not need a blurb, but is self-explanatory to most observers, and recognisable for what it is meant to portray. This also means that creating good Art becomes a task of physical skill again, instead of a mental task of weirding your audience out with bodily fluids and scrap.

2 Reasons to Trust Authors

There are lots of non-fiction books by religious and spiritual people. They often contain views and explanations about life. They often disagree. How do you sort through the masses of material for something worth some of your time?

If you trust the writings of a person, you must trust the authority of that person. I have found that when I look for books to add to my One-day-I-will-read-this list, I am more likely to decide that I trust an author if the following 2 reasons are true.

Picking your News

Most weekdays I check the BBC News website, to keep myself vaguely in the loop with what's happening outside of my bubble. I learned this habit by choice- I did not learn it from my parents, because my parents got their news from the TV.

Have you ever wondered at the differences between the two mediums, and what difference they make to each of our two generations, when it comes to our knowledge of the world?

Newspapers are a third gateway to this knowledge, but they seem to be increasingly replaced by the other two. A paper did not dictate what you got or when you got it like the television did, but the internet has provided the same freedom more effectively.