Work versus Play
The concept of ‘work versus play’ came from the idea that, as the youth of today, we live by the motto of ‘work hard, play harder’. At times, this motto might not be a bad thing but, knowing our generation, we take that a bit too seriously. Yes, I get the fact that more and more young people seek and get into higher education. But have you ever stopped and wondered how many of these first-year students drop out?
Our youth at times tend to focus more on fun times and what the weekend will bring instead of the tasks at hand. Call it what you like: procrastination; lack of drive or not knowing the seriousness of hard work. One thing is for sure, the new age is here and the youth need to take every opportunity handed to them otherwise we will have an uneducated society. The playing generation got reinforced when last year, American rapper ‘Juicy J’ held an American countrywide completion for the best twerker. This competition started as just a tweet by the rapper and soon word started spreading and in the end, 19-year-old Zaire Holmes won $50 000 for her efforts.
By Xola Qetsemani
Seems like a huge sum of money for just a couple of minutes of shaking your buttocks when in actual fact the competition was not about twerking (that part was optional). Juicy J wanted to give the money to a deserving candidate that was driven and ambitious and he did that by giving the cheque to Zaire. Other candidates obviously didn’t read the rules properly and all they did was twerk in the hope of winning the prize. This demonstrates the fact that our generation doesn’t read properly. The previous statement was a bit of a generalisation, but the point is that when people read certain documents, they skip right to the end or they skim through it looking for keywords just to get done reading.
Can we blame society for this lack of drive by the people of South Africa or even the whole world? Whoever we decide to blame for this lack of know-how, we can safely say that skills development is a much-needed goal in this day and age.
Switch off the TV, put your phone away and read, boys and girls. Read.