Don't you think that today in the world changes and advances occur much faster than they did 50 years ago, or maybe more? Of course and that is a simple answer, in the world 50 years ago there were a lot of freaking gross and ignorant people, the access to information was more complicated than it is today, however there were those who dared to pass the barrier the difficulty in obtaining the information (of any type) and managed to anticipate their time. True, perhaps education was less accessible at that time. But today we are in the information age, where a message can be sent from Brazil to Japan in seconds, where the information is within reach of a click.
50 years ago to look for a specific topic, if you wanted to gather a particular information, you should go to the nearest library to read a book that talked about the subject, often dense but accurate information. Today there are millions and millions of internet pages with informative content about all possible topics in the world, so it is valid to say that today ignorance is a choice more than a circumstance and people the more ignorant it is, the more manipulative they become, which makes them vulnerable to any kind of information they hear there or here.
I have always said that a strong mind is an independent mind, some kind of information is needed for that, questioning facts and looking for unknown information to defend a personal stance, that is what makes an independent person. To be honest, I was not an avid reader, in fact I didn't like to read a damn thing, but over time I became interested in finance and politics. Little by little I became aware of the stupid that I was, the stupid that I could become if I continued my life without reading, without learning other things. That's how I discovered the importance of reading.
Reading expands your vision. Regardless of the type of reading or theme, reading a book, a text, an article or whatever will undoubtedly make you see and understand things from the point of view of the author, each article or each text is a different point of view in the world, is a new acquired knowledge, but when a person becomes a constant reader has the ability to gather all those points of view in one and develop a criterion as objective as possible. Psychology, sports, health, politics, etc... Perhaps what an author doesn't know or don't mention in one of his texts, another author does it in another text, the point is that in an era of constant changes being ignorant is a really very harmful option, and the key to understanding these global changes is simple: reading.
Reading makes you an educated and interesting person. Exploring other subjects, other information or other minds in reading what another person writes into a text will undoubtedly give you new and valuable information, which will turn the person into a skilled conversationalist since a person who reads constantly is constantly learning topics, it is something tacit. People are attracted to other people who are good conversationalists, and one of the keys to being a good conversationalist is having enough topics to talk about, obviously this is achieved only by exploring other kind of information, and like I said it before... Reading and information is within reach of a single click today. People like to talk about topics that interest them, and if they find someone else who talks about those same topics they will automatically feel very comfortable with the presence of that other person, one day I asked my grandfather what his secret was for talking to everyone around him and he told me that his secret was to know about various topics that people were interested in.
Reading increases your vocabulary. Remember those days in school when we didn't know the meaning of a word but we could deduce it by the context to which it referred in the sentence? The same can happen today if we dedicate ourselves to reading, especially the "difficult" texts. There will be words which we won't know the meaning, but by the context of the sentence or the paragraph we can deduce it, which will greatly increase our vocabulary after a while, maybe there will be people who don't see this point so relevant, but it seems important to me to have a good vocabulary in the language that is practiced, either native language or some other language learned.
Even though we are in the information age, there are still many people in the world who do not have access to information so easily how we probably have it here in steemit, this is due to the low resources they have in their countries. So if we have a great advantage that is the internet, why not take advantage of that and develop a mind as independent as possible? As I have said before, for most of the people in this world, ignorance is a choice. Fortunately there are many people who are aware of this subject and are dedicated to learning more every day, motivated by an inexhaustible curiosity.
The key to start reading is to start questioning things, start questioning paradigms among other topics. There is a whole universe of information out there, of which we may not even know 5%.
So start reading as soon as possible!
You have wise grandfather. Nice!
nice post , as an avid reader i can not apprecciate it. =) Keep reading !!
kjashfahskjdkaj whatever dude