The Deadly Sword of Time

in #blog6 years ago

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Have you ever wondered why it seems like we have more prominent successful people today than ever before?

Whether it’s sports, or science or arts, or any field really.... There are countless superstars that any one of us can name given any field.

Take music for example, if you were asked to name as many musicians as you can from just a century or two ago, how many names do you think the average person could come up with?

Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Vivaldi..Etc.

Total count? Half a dozen on a good day.

Now go ask them to name musicians from this era and the result would almost certainly be in the three digits range. From Madonna to Taylor Swift, from Metallica to King Crimson, from Miles Davis to Coltrane, from Elvis Presley to Sinatra passing by the Backstreet Boys…

The average adult person has probably seen thousands of superstars conquering the world stage during a mere two or three decades.

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Granted, following one’s passion and making it their life work is a luxury that was almost nonexistent in the past centuries. And maybe we should take a moment to reflect on that appreciate what we have.

I mean, can you imagine if you were born in 1686 instead of 1986?

Chances are that you’d be stuck for the rest of your life into the lowest level of the Maslow Pyramid… Without the wifi of course.

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There are other factors involved, the invention of television brought upon a massive distribution outlet, just like the printing press before it.

The internet then came around and started knocking the doors right from behind the gatekeepers backs, thus giving everyone a fighting shot if they’re willing to roll their sleeves up.

And it keeps getting better as we’re now at the very beginning stages of the blockchain revolution, but that’s a subject for another story.

The best part of all is that the internet never forgets. Which means that you can find all the advice and experience form previous overachievers that share your dreams and aspirations and who have already blazed the path to desired destination.

You can learn from their mistakes and their discoveries, and you can get inspired by their stories, stories that you can actually relate to.

But that doesn’t come without responsibility, as you have to self-regulate the amount of content that you consume, as well as the quality and relevance which is even more important than the amount of time dedicated to the task.

In an era where there is an insane amount of knowledge and opportunity that can help you pursue your personal aspirations, about the worst thing you can do is to fall into the internet's most notorious trap where you’re they have you constantly chasing after the latest dopamine shot and hating on people that you disagree with.

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A few centuries ago, medieval serfs had no choice, they had no options in life. Nothing to do but spend every waking hour labouring for the nobility. The nobility that seizes everything from them and keeps them divided by feeding them each other as an outlet to release their anger and frustration.

Give them half the options we have, and they’ll be kissing their lucky stars for such a mind blowing array of possibilities. They’ll toss that pitchfork without batting an eye.

So why should you pick it up at the cost of your own dreams and aspirations?

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They say that time is a double edge sword, you can use it to clear the pathway towards your goals... Or it can be used to kill your dreams. The problem however, is that no one escapes time.

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I agree that time has changed and the amount of opportunities have grown exponentially, so has the population. It's a dog-eat-dog world out here, everyone wants a shot at greatness because we believe it is achievable, unlike the medieval period where people were slaving away their entire lives because they did not have a choice. Now we do have a choice and that comes with disappoints, especially when we cannot achieve the things we deem possible and withing our reach. In a nutshell, there are changes and improvement in terms of the opportunities available to people in this era but it's accompanied with its own challenges.

Speaking about information, I totally agree with you when you talked about consuming the right information. I even spoke about this in a post of mine. There are lot of things out here on the cyberspace. Information is moving at an unprecedented level. Unfortunately a significant part of these information are worthless and it's imperative that one guides their mind. A lot seem to make sense but in actuality they don't.
Lastly, we all have the capacity to be great and some of the challenges we face current in terms of allocating scarce resource will be addressed adequately as humanity progress.

Oh yeah, I'm with you there. The opportunities come with their own challenges, it's just that it's a big step from generations ago.

That's why I called it having "a fighting chance" instead of "a chance". So yeah, I totally agree.

And yeah, we need to learn how to prioritize time of information as you said, that's a challenge on its own. :P

P.S: I saw you joined steemit recently so I'd like to wish you a nice welcome to this awesome platform.

thank you very much, I'm enjoying the exprience.

Perhaps we are just lucky to live in this moment; to have a plethora of opportunities in front of us. It's up to us how to make the most out of these opportunities, and use them not only for our benefit, but to make this world and the humanity in it in a better place.

For sure if we are successful in that, we'll make the last generations who didn't have a choice prouder than we could ever imagine. 😊

Definitely the tools are there, and I hope that between everyone we end up leaving the world better than we when we came in :)

Buzzy. I have wondered this often!

Haha me too! Nice profile pic btw :)

Why thank you! Yours is lovely also :D

Nice topic. Still I feel your opening argument is not the strongest. Maybe people can't mention as many names from earlier times, simply because that's not the time they lived in. Skip another 200 years and ask a person from that future to name musicians from their vs our time - he'll probably be able to name more from his own time, right? The thing is - it's so hard to make any judgements about a life we never lived. The other day I read that the hunters, from the hunter gatherers time (of whom I thought they worked very hard, always) did their hunting stuff for just a few hours a day and had a whole lot of lazy time too. We can make up stories about different era's, which make them sound either very tough or very easy. But life is life for all of us, more than what we face surrounding us, we have our own thoughts and cognitions to either survive or take charge of...

One has to respect time and if one don't time will simply not respect them

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