By Aiden Richmond | LTVN Managing Editor
Picture yourself 10 years old again. You’re in fifth grade and you wake up to a crisp Saturday fall morning. Unless you had a weird obsession with the wonky opening of ESPN’s College GameDay programming, you were most likely switching the TV on to Nickelodeon or Disney Channel.
What happened to our simple-minded foolishness? Where our biggest problem was our parents telling us to turn the TV off because we had to go to bed so we didn’t “rot our brains.”
Being a college student isn’t a “live your days in the shadows of rainbows” type of thing, especially at a university that prioritizes its academics as much as Baylor does. Then you add whatever else you do to fill your plate: greek life, a job or organizations on campus.
We do a lot. We also stress ourselves out a lot. The back-of-mind thoughts that you need to study for that exam between these times because you have that event there, and then you’re trying to meet with your friends for dinner.
I remember as a kid thinking that kids’ shows deciding to split a 30-minute show slot into two 15-minute episodes was weird, until I realized they were preparing us for adulthood.
With cellphones and social media, our attention spans have shrunk; most of us would get bored if something as simple as a kid show was 30 minutes in length. However, I think that 15 minutes is a perfect number.
The time between classes at Baylor is 15 minutes; you could watch a skit of SpongeBob in that time. You’d get the same thing you get out of your phone and scrolling reels: a quick laugh in between the stress of classes.
You could sit and watch an episode of Bluey to calm your mind at home after a long time in the library studying. Use kids’ shows to reset your mind to a state of simplicity.
Maybe that episode of Doc McStuffins reminds you why you want to be a nurse or that episode of Sid the Science Kid reminds you why you want to be an engineer. Maybe it’s as simple as you just wanted to laugh at the dumb jokes of SpongeBob and The Amazing World of Gumball.
To put my idea into a shorter version.
Be that kid you were again sometimes.
Be the kid whose biggest problem was your parents turning the TV off of your favorite show. We work hard enough to justify it.
