Recently, I have just finished reading Brave New World. Personally, it was one of the most interesting books that I have read in a while. It had many interesting aspects to it, however, I feel that one theme stood out to me more than any other. The story seems to convey that a heavy focus on entertainment and happiness can be dangerous.
In Brave New World, the society clearly values happiness and entertainment over truth and knowledge. There are a lot of games that they play, plenty of consumer goods that they can buy such as nice clothes, and they can even use a drug called soma that gives the user happy hallucinations that distract them from reality. All of these things contribute to society being distracted by leisure and entertainment and the World State having vast control over everyone's lives and using stability to justify their control. The society may be stable and happy, but there are also many negative consequences to this. First of all, the society completely sacrifices truth and knowledge. New scientific knowledge that can destabilize the society is hidden, simply leading to a lack of knowledge of science. Also, this distraction causes a decrease in close personal relationships. For example, the mere idea of parents and families is seen as vulgar and commitments in marriage are seen as abnormal.
The interesting thing is that this is strikingly similar to our society today. With cell phones, computers, and the invention of social media such as facebook, people are constantly separated from each other because they are to busy with amusing themselves with their cell phones, preventing the development of close relationships. Furthermore, video games, television, and movies also create new distractions in our society. This just shows that society today has a very big focus on entertainment and media and is in danger of losing personal connections.
I partially agree with you on how technology is separating us nowadays, but at the same time it does connect people. It's so easy to contact my family in Mexico and Guatemala through social media and communication apps. Thanks to technology many barriers have been broken about communicating with others around the world. While there it seems personal connections are being lost in real life other connections are also being made.
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