SOURCE of modern man's weakness, stupidity, and general lack of vitality?
His leisure activities
Aldous Huxley predicted the degeneracy of modern amusements in a 103 year old essay: Pleasures (1920)
Huxley on why and how to radically rewire the way you spend your free time👇🏻
1/ Aldous Huxley writes that pleasures must not be an escape from effort
In fact, they must be unavailable *without* effort
Why? Because when preceded by effort, pleasure reinvigorates
But when preceded by nothing, pleasure retards your brain's reward systems
2/ Regression of "entertainment"
At royal weddings, theological debates were arranged as entertainment
Logicians debated God at Prince Palatine’s engagement
Huxley: “There was a time when people indulged themselves with distractions requiring a certain intellectual effort”
3/ Huxley notes that in Elizabethan times, regular people “could be relied upon” to break into complex musical acts like madrigals or motets
People had to “exert their minds to an uncommon degree” to entertain themselves
This kept their minds SUPPLE
Normies today could never..
4/ Aldous Huxley hated mass manufactured distractions
On movies:
“Countless audiences passively soak in the tepid bath of nonsense. No mental effort is demanded of them, no participation; they need only sit and keep their eyes open.”
But mental effort is NECESSARY
5/ Huxley writes that in the past, entertainment was a consequence of ACTIVE collaboration between friends, family, and neighbors
Today, these very people sit in darkness in movie theatres
And silently watch something that STRANGERS made halfway across the world...
6/ In The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond writes about African kids who make model airplanes from sticks and stones by looking at a newspaper picture
Kids in rich societies buy airplane sets from the mall
Kids’ entertainment becomes passive in advanced societies...
7/ Huxley on how tech makes us LESS creative: "Before machinery men who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them with machinery"
"Artistic culture" dies in such an environment...
8/ In Huxley's Brave New World, the "savage" says the following to the technocrat who wants humanity happy and comfortable:
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin."
These are conditions for GROWTH
9/ Notice the "fort" in comfort
The Latin root of comfort means to *fortify* - to make stronger
The original sense of comfort was rest that READIES you for war. NOT lounging without aim. Aldous Huxley writes that we must return to the original meaning of the word...
Thank you for your time fren! I appreciate it
Make Leisure Great Again
Follow me for more: @oldbooksguy
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