Scythe (Arc of a Scythe, #1)

by Neal Shusterman

People can read anything, but no one does. All they do is play games and watch cat holograms.”

The more things change the more they stay the same. I think this section gets highlighted so often because we’ve all been there. The more streaming platforms we have, the fewer things we feel like watching. The more books on our kindle, the less likely we are to read them. One of the consequences of having the world at our fingertips is that we lose interest in all of it. Nothing’s rare anymore—nothing has psychological value when it’s no more than a click away. When I was a kid, if you missed something on TV, you missed it. You’d have to wait until it showed up on reruns maybe a year later. Sitting down to watch something like The Wizard of Oz was a huge family holiday event, because it only came on once a year. To try to recapture that, we made Spirited Away our family movie when my kids were younger, and I only allowed us to watch it one a year. Same thing with The Nightmare Before Christmas. Had to keep them special! So, back to the quote—with the entire library of human literature at our fingertips, what do we spend our time doing? You know the answer!