Think.

So few people, in today's society at least, truly understand distance, time and space. We live in a world in which attention span is scarcely required, let alone a common trait. Such immediacy, such constant, cheap stimulation is so much the norm that appreciation of the magnitude and scale of our lives is impossible to come by. Modern society is packed, every second filled with news, television, film, music and media. Books, sadly, less so. But with constant sensory distraction, unreality reigns. We are bereft; empty shells of men who stumble deliriously as if lost in the desert, forceful and bold, but with nothing as such to aim for. Every mirage burns itself into our minds. Every waking moment sees us bombarded with meaningless, stupefying nonsense. It is hard to know where to begin. Televisions built into the back of car seats means that even a process as simple as sitting quietly in the back of a car is discouraged and undesirable, we cannot be away from stark colour, light and sound for even a moment without the churning numbness of boredom harassing the fringes of our thoughts. Frankly, however, we are unlikely ever to give it a chance. More likely, the steady, unabated sedation of our brains will continue aggressively and purposefully, eventually driving opportunity and motive for depth of thought from our fragile collective psyche. Instead, inane, cackling halfwits will sneeringly decide on our behalf who is talented, who is dancing successfully on the ice and who should be voted out of the Big Brother jungle. But we won't argue, we will close ourselves to everything, every nourishing morsel of intellectualism, scrabbling around for the next opinion to which we should cling as stranded seafarers, clutching desperately to what we perceive to be rocks in order to save ourselves from the savage, crashing seas of reality which menace our steps. The causes of our moral and intellectual decline are multi-faceted and highly complex, but one thing is certain - our society could not have achieved such mass pacification without willingness from the majority, consciously or not.