In 1964, the organization World in Action decided to film the lives of 16 seven-year-olds in the United Kingdom, in order to explore the adage "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man." Michael Apted worked on the film, and decided to continue the series, by documenting these children's lives every 7 years. Neil Hughes is one of those children. The following video is an interview segment with him, at the age of 28 years old. I connect with a lot of what he says, in terms of society, life, and the meaning behind it.
A series of quotes and statements I relate to by Neil Hughes from the Michael Apted documentary 28 UP.
"I don't think I ever had any stability... to be quite honest. I can't think of any time in my life when I ever did. I don't think I've been kicking against anything. I've been kicking in mid-air the whole of my life."
"There's a lot more to do in the mountains. What I found here is that you don't talk about things like the weather, because the weather is all-around. Everyone knows it's been raining. That makes good sense to me."
"I'm not the sort of person who can go to a pub, sit down with a drink, listen to the jukebox, and talk a lot of rubbish. A lot of people find that very relaxing. But if I'm going to talk to somebody. A) I have to be able to hear myself speaking, and B) I have to be talking about something that actually has a meaning."
"I'm not trying to denigrate the way that most people relax. But I can't do that. I'm lost in a noisy pub. I'll sit in the quiet corner of a quiet pub, and then I'll want to talk about literature or something like that, which not everyone will want."
"I don't think I was so much clever. I think I was quite enthusiastic about the subjects I was studying, therefore with some good teaching, I was able to get some good results."
"No formal education can prepare anybody for life. Only life can prepare you for what comes. Sooner or later, you're going to have to cross certain barriers. And I don't think you ever cross those at school or at university. You come across the problem of mixing with other people. But the real problem of becoming a success in the world is something you have to tackle yourself."
"What my background has given me is just being part of a very impersonal society. The most you can hope to achieve is to have the right to climb into a suburban train 5 or 10 times a week, and just about stagger back. The least is just unemployment."
Q: What are the things about modern society that turn you off?
A: The cheap satisfaction in so many things, the aimlessness... but I think the total lack of thought is at the bottom of it.
"Nobody seems to know where they or anybody else is going, and nobody seems to worry. You finish the week. You come home. You plug into the TV set for the weekend, and then you manage to get back to work on Monday. And it seems to me that this is just a slow-path to total brain-washing. And it seems to me that if you have a brain-washed society, then you're heading towards doom. There's no question about that."
"What I look like is not necessarily what I feel like. I'm not claiming that I feel as though I'm in some sort of nirvana. But I'm claiming that if I was living in some sort of suburbia, I'd feel like cutting my throat."
"I don't think I was really taught any sort of policy of living at all by my parents. This is probably one of the biggest mistakes. I was just left to fend for myself in a world in which they seemed completely oblivious of. I found that even when I tried to discuss problems that were facing me in school. My parents didn't seem to be aware of the nature of the problem."
"I sometimes feel when I'm on my own, that I'm losing touch with the way other people live."
"You can't afford to go around looking depressed. That, in itself, is bad enough."
"No, I'm not better than anything or anybody, I'm just somebody with my own particular difficulties, with my own particular obstacles to surpass. And everybody else is doing the exact same thing."
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