twenty-eight years and a million words
I've been going to the gym for about two weeks, now, and I have noticed that I'm having a hell of a time concentrating at work (or at home, but what else is new?). Then it dawned on me this afternoon, as I was making my sole allotment of coffee, that it's the caffeine withdrawal, not the gym! Why, oh why did I try to quit coffee at the same time as I joined the gym?
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)