Paper Towns

​"What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person." -Margo Roth Spiegelman ('Paper Towns).

This is a top-of-the-reading-list novel, and an eye-opener for those who are too concerned with their own lives to look at the people around them. The book discusses some very important issues encountered by people in their every-day lives, these including our constant worry about the future, the way we experience emusement by doing stupid things (such as drinking), and the way we are all demented with the mania of owning things, these all being "...paper-thin and paper-frail."

As Margo Roth Spegelman suggested in the book, people in the ancient world did not worry so much about the future due to their short life-span. The maximum age of death was around 30 years. People did not have time to worry about their career or their schooling life. They didn't even have time to worry about cleaning their teeth until William Addis (an Englishman, probably sick of having to smell his friends' morning breaths every day) invented the toothbrush. Now, however, the life expectancy of people in non-third-world countries has increased by more than twice the number, and people have been given more time to plan. And that's exactly what they have done; they have created schools for every child in the country so that these children can go to university, so that they can get a good job and create a good living environment for their children, and so that they can afford to send the children to a good school so that the children can create a good living environment for their children. Life has become a cycle so mainstream and unoriginal that we can hardly afford to call it a life anymore.

What us adolescents in the new generation currently entitle as 'Life' is going out to parties, drinking, and breaking the law. Nobody cares about anything that matters anymore, the only things we classify as important are our social status and the amount of money we have.

#philosophy #education #book #novel #life