What I Learnt Today

David Brookes, opinion columnist for the New York Times, wrote a university graduation speech for students unable to attend their graduation.

He is worried about the future of your maximum taste. Is it true “that 70 percent of the people you know are more boring at 30 than they were at 20?”

At University we are assigned hard things to do and challenging ways to think.

“After college, most of us resolve to keep doing this kind of thing, but we’re busy and our brains are tired at the end of the day. Months and years go by. We get caught up in stuff, settle for consuming Twitter and, frankly, journalism. Our maximum taste shrinks.”

David is fine with us watching Tiger King and Love is Blind, but he says we also need to extend the higher end of out thinking.

“The theory of maximum taste says that each person’s mind is defined by its upper limit—the best that it habitually consumes and is capable of consuming.””

“Because we don’t continue to put enough really excellent stuff into our brain, our reading-comprehension ability declines after college, and our ability to play with ideas. The upper limit of our mind becomes lower than it used to be.

“The “theory of maximum taste” is based on the idea that exposure to genius has the power to expand your consciousness. If you spend a lot of time with genius, your mind will end up bigger and broader than if you spend your time only with run-of-the-mill stuff.

We need to have a mixed mental diet.

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In a landmark judgment, the Federal Court found the environment minister has a duty of care to young people, as reported in the Conversation.

It is remarkable that this was a matter for debate.

The court found that

one million of today’s Australian children are expected to be hospitalised because of a heat-stress episode, that substantial economic loss will be experienced, and that the Great Barrier Reef and most of Australia’s eucalypt forest won’t exist when they grow up.

Justice Bromberg said in his judgement:

It is difficult to characterise in a single phrase the devastation that the plausible evidence presented in this proceeding forecasts for the children. As Australian adults know their country, Australia will be lost and the world as we know it gone as well.

The physical environment will be harsher, far more extreme and devastatingly brutal when angry. As for the human experience – quality of life, opportunities to partake in nature’s treasures, the capacity to grow and prosper – all will be greatly diminished.

Lives will be cut short. Trauma will be far more common and good health harder to hold and maintain.

None of this will be the fault of nature itself. It will largely be inflicted by the inaction of this generation of adults, in what might fairly be described as the greatest inter-generational injustice ever inflicted by one generation of humans upon the next.

To say that the children are vulnerable is to understate their predicament.

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