My generation was lucky.

  We crossed the fraught years of adolescence before home video games took hold towards the end of the 1970’s. When Atari added a second dash to their wildly popular Pong game I remember thinking “what will they think of next!”

  Well they thought of a whole lot. 

  But we were already past the dangerously susceptible childhood and early teen years so the increasingly rapid gaming enticements took place as if in the rear view mirror. 

  We were launched on Life, muddling through our late teens, navigating university, out forging careers, getting married and starting families. 

  Or most of us at any rate. 

  As it happened I chose a different route. Unwilling to accept the conventional middle class path handed to me on a silver platter I dropped out and began questioning everything. 

  It was a difficult time and I spent a great deal of it in libraries and used bookstores. As hard as it is to imagine back then there was no other option for a guy hungry for unacademic knowledge and craving words of wisdom. There was no internet and cellphones still lay twenty years in the future. There were only books and believe me without a guide or mentor to point me in the right direction it was slow going! 

  But here’s the thing: there is simply no substitute for the glacial-like slow-going work.  

  None. 

  Because work IS the lesson. The striving IS the wisdom. 

  So the question I am asking today is: were I starting out my journey now could I avoid the numerous pitfalls, the abounding deafening cultural distractions, the mind bending and then destroying drugs, and the ubiquity and attentive allure of the cellphone? 

  I’m not so sure I could. 

  I feel sorry for young Shaman-Types today….