Satire is an amazing communicative device. While I tend to thing that it is overused in our society, it nevertheless retains enormous persuasive power. While satire is intended to be funny, it can and should be so much more. The best satire uses humor as a vehicle to force the audience to rethink an assumption or reconsider a viewpoint.
This article from the Onion -- one of the foremost purveyors of satire -- hits this note remarkably well. While it is an extremely funny article, my hope is that people who read it don't stop just at the humor. Instead, this article should compel people to think about their priorities in life and how their day-to-day actions actually align with those priorities. While it's easy to brush this aside as just another funny article from the Onion, I hope that you take a few minutes to reflect after reading it. As a friend wrote after sharing this on Facebook, "the fact that 7 people have shared this in the past day makes me feel like we're all doing something wrong..."
"Find The Thing You're Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights And Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life" by David Ferguson
Published in the Onion, March 20, 2013
Eric
That article is kind of sad because realistically how many people is that true of?
ReplyDeleteExactly. That's why I wish people didn't just laugh it off. Yeah, it's funny, but it's funny because it mocks a lot of the things that we valorize in our society (like sacrificing your time and overall well-being for work-related ambitions).
DeleteEric