The Iron Yuppie

TV will kill you and your children!

or

TV will save humanity!

I probably fall into the former camp more than the latter, but this is exactly why it's so hard for Joe Random Individual to figure out what to do when it comes to raising his kids, eating right or generally doing good things. I'm sure there's a way to rationalize two totally opposing views like this, but I don't have it. And I doubt that 99.999% of the population does either. So we go along, choosing the sources that seem to make sense from us and reading them (or more likely, just skimming the back of the books) and using them as a guideline for our lives.

I was thinking that the way out of this might just be to try to imagine what evolution had in mind for us. If we evolved (and by evolved I mean during the time period from the primordial soup to about 50,000 years ago) to be creatures that would benefit from a lot of random stories and flashing lights, then TV would be good. If we evolved to be creatures that could react to those stories and flashing lights, but that was a bastardization of areas of our mind that were really tuned for other things, then TV would be bad.

But then I came to realize the possibility that maybe evolution was done with me, meaning that the way our bodies were originally designed no longer has any meaning at my age. Basically, we are just sperm/egg carrying machines and our single goal appears to be to shoot them out as soon as possible, have kids and get them old enough to an age where they can do the same. If that's the case, then I am WAY past that age and, evolutionarily speaking, I'm off the map. Much like the salmon who swim upstream to spawn die right afterwards, perhaps that's what we were intended to do after hitting the appropriate age. Though I do believe in God, I've never been a fan of thinking that humans had some higher purpose that we were living for. Generally, passing on our genes and leaving the Earth a better place than we found it was pretty much the extent of my thoughts on "why we were here", whether you did that at 15 or 75. So does this mean I should just pop them out and shuffle off this mortal coil?

Actually, I think evolution will again be my saving grace. If there's one thing that evolution has going for it, it is that whatever you've got costs something... food to keep it alive, personal space, energy to heat it, keeping it out of pain or not broken, and so on. The very fact that my femur CAN survive for 90 years indicates that, evolutionarily speaking, it's a good thing that it can last for 90 years. Otherwise, it would have gotten the heave-ho long ago. So what to guide me for another 60 years? Who knows. Maybe I'll find my reason for living on the Discovery Channel.

D