Thoughts of a Psychology Student

Though I haven't posted on here in a while, it has seemed that a topic keeps cropping up in every day happenings so much so that I decided I should write about it. The topic in question is Stories. More precisely, the importance of stories in a literal sense but also as an abstract concept. I suppose this thought process began whilst I was debating whether or not to take a gap year before university. The idea of being able to travel the world in pursuit of so called 'self discovery' has always appealed to me, just as it did to Forster's Lucy Honeychurch and indeed John Green's  Quentin “Q” Jacobsen. But the more I thought about it, the more it  occurred  to me that perhaps this idea of finding out 'who you are' is just an idea found in story books and the first world. For want of a better phrase, self discovery is ultimately a "first world problem". So what does this have to do with stories? Well during a discussion with one of the teache...

So I was sat on the train the other day, and I overheard a conversation between a mother and a child about the supposed ‘excessive’ amount of time that he spent on ‘screens’ during the day. The mother’s argument was that his ‘addiction’ to these screens had a negative effect on the way he socialised in real life, and his performance at school. Now, whilst I agree that sitting on Facebook for hours on end, absent mindedly refreshing the page for something remotely interesting to appear on your news-feed is counter productive to say the least, I strongly disagree that spending time on ‘screens’ is a bad thing; providing you go about it in the right way. We are blessed with the gift of the internet. We have an enormous archive of valuable knowledge quite literally at our fingertips, and the younger generations have all the skills and intuition to access it. I have been struck recently at the amount of fantastic educational channels that exist on YouTube. Ter...