A thought struck me this morning that some/many people live through watching others live. My mother came to mind in a long ago incident.
She called me up and in a distressed voice said, "I'm so worried about Jennifer!" I racked my brain, not finding anyone by that name in her circle. So I asked her who Jennifer was. I was shocked by her response that she was someone on a soap opera. My mother, who had been a successful buyer for department stores, retired and spent a lot of her retirement just looking out the front window and watching television. She was a help with my children, allowing me to go back to university to earn my teaching credential. She did some other things, if course, but she did spend a huge amount of time watching others live or pretend to live in tv dramas.
My thoughts turned to today. Many adventures are not done personally but are done by watching people on tv programs going on adventures or by entering a video game. Many emotions are felt by taking on the outrages of tv talking heads. On and on...
So instead of living and learning and risking and overcoming, we let others do that for us as we watch. The pretenders on tv are our surrogates for living, if we let them.
I wonder what would happen if we retired our surrogates and went out to fully live our own lives???
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