Sports are considered very important for children’s development, and rightly so. Participating in such activities promotes healthy competition and a better understanding of one’s self. It also, supposedly, promotes teamwork. But there is a problem there, which I will refer to as the fallacy of teamwork: playing together and playing as a team are two very different aspects. Confusing them can lead to serious consequences in terms of parent-child relationship. It can also have negative consequences for a child’s development.
As I have mentioned before, experiencing is an integral part of being an author. You must see the world around you before you write. And so, I have learned to pay attention to seemingly unimportant events around me. Let me tell you two little stories that are related to today’s topic, the fallacy of teamwork.
Playing together and playing as a team are two vastly different concepts
In my post about nostalgia I talked about the fact that we recollect not space or time, but feelings. Still, problems related to time (and space) can and do creep in. Have you notice how expensive retro items have become?
For instance, I couldn’t have imagined when I was a kid, growing up in the 80s, that items such as my Casio wristwatch, my Tomy water games, or my board games, would three decades later be worth 10 times their value. To some extent, this is something you can expect with retro or vintage items.
And yet, one would think that such should be the case with something that is either far older (say, a toy from the 1920s) or far more rare (say, a limited-edition camera). To see a simple plastic toy from the 80s, which was surely produced in substantial quantities, cost a hundred euros or more, is baffling. What could be the reason for that, why are some 80s retro items expensive?
I had a similar watch in the 80s. Back then it cost peanuts. Nowadays, not exactly
At the banquet following my doctoral defense, a colleague asked me about my future plans. I mentioned that, among other things, I planned to continue writing fiction. That colleague then said something that made quite an impression on me: “The problem with writing fiction nowadays is that there are more writers than readers”. Those words really resonated with me. I don’t know if this is actually the case – instinctively I would say “it can’t be” – but I’m afraid if not literally true, then it’s pretty damn close. You don’t need me to tell you what that means in terms of supply-and-demand economics.
In the first article written for this blog, I had said this:
I hope I don’t come off as too self-important when I say that people like me […]with the artistry to create and populate fictional worlds and characters (that are still allegorically linked to “reality”), would have been revered masters and teachers in another time and another place.
This is an extreme example of the very same situation, only in reverse. It alludes to times when writing (that is, literacy itself) was not a given. To be able to write and write fiction, to boot, was something akin to witchcraft. I suppose we tend to be mesmerized by things we don’t understand; to me, knitting is like quantum physics.
But nowadays, although there might not necessarily be more writers than readers in a literal sense, the number of people who have the possibility to write something they call fiction, publish it in some way, and make it accessible to a wide – indeed an international – audience has skyrocketed.
Writing was very hard when we didn’t have typewriters. It was hard when we didn’t have computers. Now, anyone can tap on the keys and “write a novel”
