Exhaustion is endemnic.
People are numb from the experience of life.
Too worn down for persistence, resistance or insight.
Glued to Netflix and doom scrolling,
Too tired to resist the lure of addictive dopamine hits.
Blasted by endless onslaught of unhealthy options.
Who can fight that?
Its hard enough to find time to sort your ever-rising utility bills, nevermind summoning the will to build something great.
Every day, the life is being sucked out right out of us by weapons of the addictive & seductive attention economy.
Resistance to this is futile.
The best minds in behavioural science are paid obscene amounts to manipulate our attention.
But there is a way out:
A way to get back your mental clarity, and a sense of peace in your life.
Our best weapon is control our environment, and our information diet.
People I meet are often stunned at how little I know about major occurrences around the world.
I keep telling them I don’t watch the news.
If it’s important enough, I’ll hear about it from Bruce, my neighbour.
It’s not a lack of concern, or aloofness;
It’s a conscious choice.
A choice to place myself outside the noise and bustle of the news cycle.
It’s a peaceful life, all considered.
Ignorance is indeed bliss.
But today that tranquilly was broken when my LinkedIn feed force fed me a controversial article about an Olympic fight between a man and a woman on LinkedIn.
I couldn’t avoid it; The news cycle is desperately spinning every morcel from the Olympics into a “hot topic”
and the world of social was awash with people jumping on the hot issue around gender roles in sports.
I saw a of flurry of activity, viral posts, polls opening petitions.
Celebrities like Elon musk and JK Rowling are jumping on the issues flaming the speculation.
Basically people were losing their shit over a sport they probably had no interest in.
Of course, the issue was a bit more complicated than the snappy headline.
“Man fights woman in Olympics”
I seriously doubt anyone with an opinion has done much research or fact checking.
I’m including those that wrote the article.
In fact I’d bet the writers had other goals in mind,
and balanced journalism was pretty far down the list of goals.
The goal, as always, was to capture and hold as much of your attention as possible.
What leads a perfectly sane person to waste 4 valuable hours on a Wednesday morning,
organising a poll around an issue which has little or no impact on them?
Then spend the week consuming more content around the issue,
encuring a rising anger around the issue,
until it spills out into your work, your social interactions, your rest, your sleep cycle?
I felt my own urge to jump onto social and bash out my condemnation on my keyboard.
But as soon as I became aware of my own hypocrisy,
I also realised my own emotions were being steered and manipulated by strange unseen hands…
I didn’t matter that my reaction was to not react.
I was still having a strong emotional reaction.
which was exactly the writer’s intention.
The reaction itself didn’t matter.
Which is more scary when you think about it….
The bias of the article is irrelevant.
Only the reaction itself matters.
“we don’t care what they people about it, so long as they fight over it”
Why do we have such strong opinions on something which has little or no impact on us?
We react with such strong emotionally to divisive topics we see in the news because
The news reacts to things that people engage with emotionally.
People love to talk about gender issues so much because it’s in the news.
and gender issues are in the news so much because people love to talk about it.
It’s a perfect example of the feedback loop behind the news cycle.
When it comes to your attention,
nothing is off limits for the news cycle:
No trick is too dirty,
No rules are too important.
No line is too sacred to cross.
You see,
This isn’t a debate about gender roles or transgenderism.
This is an about the attention economy,
the hidden harm it’s causing you,
and the insidious drain it has on your potential.
We live in an age where the most valuable resource is your attention.
“Engagement” is the new measure of gold.
This self-perpetuating cycle of over-inflation of non-issues has a terrifying goal:
They want your attention.
They want all of it.
All the time.
They want to leave you no time left to pay attention to the only thing that’s real:
your own life.
They are literally trying to steal your time.
Indeed we seem to spend a truly terrifying amount of what little time we have in life consuming, thinking about and talking about issues,
which we have no previous stake in,
issues which have been forced upon us on a whim,
disrupting our days and thoughts without permission.
News is not the only perpetrator here…
Entertainment churns out an endless stream of shows directly designed to install FOMO in the office gossip circles.
If you haven’t watched the latest episode, you can’t contribute to the conversation.
(Don’t even get me started on StarWars, I’m about to have an emotional reaction) 🤣
This keeps people trapped in an endless cycle of vegetation and mindlessness.
This is right on the tails of the Southport riots.
The English defence league leapt to the defence of the English people by heroically trashing English cars and looting nearby shops for English dry goods and bog roll.
A lot of people were also hurt and terrorized.
These riots were started based on false information about the perpetrator.
Information which spread like wildfire on…
You guessed it, social media!
40 police officers injured,
People terrorized,
All caused by knee jerk reactions to fake news on social media.
Are we really so gullible?
Are we so easily manipulated?
Do we not realise every post we see on social media has an intention behind it?
So how should we treat the news?
The world is full of awful events which deserve our sympathy.
But how do they affect me?
They don’t.
What can I do about them to help?
Nothing
Whenever I have an emotional reaction to a news article, I have to ask myself:
- Do I care about them enough to become an activist and to take action?
- Would adding my opinion to the noise on social media make any difference?
- Does my engagement just aid the author’s ulterior motives?
Sometimes the only rational thing to do is to not engage.
What if the news does affect me?
So what to do if the news does affect you, if it’s chewing you up and causing an emotional drain.
It’s hard to ignore real issues knocking down the door.
- Who’s in charge of the country?
- What are they doing about the cost of living?
- Will I ever be able to retire?
The next question I would ask is:
“can I impact the outcome?”
This isn’t being passive,
it’s an active choice
Why do we feel the need to add our opinion to every piece?
“Thinking fast and slow” has some really interesting insight into why we are never stumped for an answer.
If we don’t know the answer to a question, we substitute the hard question for an easier one.
Simple narrative always beats complex facts .
Basically, our brains crave a good story, even when we know logically that the story is probably a bit more complicated
A monstrous stabbing attack on children?
It makes no sense
It must be one of them Illegal immigrants stealing our jobs and attacking our children.
Hey, now my anger makes sense.
But once you become aware of this fact,
to act without thought becomes weak mindedness.
And it doesn’t just affect raving racists in Southport.
It affects all of us.
All of these symptoms of the same problem:
reacting emotionally to things outside of your wheelhouse.
You don’t have to invest your energy in an opinion
Resist your monkey brains urge for a knee jerk reaction
Many of life’s miseries can be a tributed to these kind of reactions.
Other People will have a different opinion,
and that’s just fine,
I don’t have to convince other people of my own opinion,
life isn’t a debate club.
Or brains may crave a neat story,
but it usually doesn’t exist.
life is messy.
There are almost no issues in life which can be divided into black or white.
So nurture the ability to get comfortable with people having a different opinion.
Practice not caring about things that don’t affect you.
The next time you see something and feel yourself reacting ask yourself is this worth my time and attention?
So when someone asks
“What do you think of X?”
Allow yourself to say
- “I don’t know”
- “I don’t know enough about it”
- “It sounds like a complex topic”
- “No idea, it doesn’t affect me”
- “There may be more than one right answer to this”
Here’s a few questions I try to ask myself to reveal if I’m acting hastily:
- How many articles have I read about this subject?
- Have I read even at least one opposing view to my own for a balanced viewpoint?
- Do you have any experience or knowledge in this field?
- Who was the source of this and what are their motives?
- Is this an issue which affects me directly?
- Do I plan to take action on this?
If I can’t answer all of the above,
then I should probably pipe down.
There’s a reason this list is quite long.
Most issues don’t qualify for a reaction.
The stoics say every injury happens to you twice:
- Once when you’re struck,
- When you recall or react to it.
By endlessly bringing up a subject and recalling the story you are drawing up unnecessary stress and anger.
Someone cuts you off on the motorway.
You store up the story, go home and rant to your partner about it…
You’ve just hurt yourself twice.
You can’t fix or control being cut off.
It’s annoying sure,
but it has very little impact on your life or time.
Want a victory?
Don’t engage with that which is outwith your control
Let it go, move on, and don’t let them hurt you twice by bringing it up again.
Control your information diet
On a daily, we fill our heads with SO much crap.
once seen, you can’t forget it.
We have news feeds with subjects we don’t care about rammed down our throats,
we have to scroll past endless thumbnails of new Netflix shows.
We battle with celebrity news, catchy headlines and unfinished story threads.
It takes brain space just to control your attention and wrestle it back to the important stuff.
Think of all the wasted energy, emotional energy stray some time that goes into topics and issues outside your areas of interest.
Very little of it has any impact on your life.
It’s amazing how much more brain space you have when it isn’t filled with crap
People get so wound up about issues which have no impact over them personally.
Think what they could do if they put that energy towards their lifestyle, business or family.
Sometimes the only sane thing to do is to not engage.
Corporations want to steal your energy, your attention, your thoughts and direct it towards themselves.
Don’t let them.
Fight back.
If you want to control your own life,
Control your information diet.
Cultivate a habit of non-engagement,
You don’t have to engage.
You don’t have to watch the news.
You don’t have to have an opinion.
Focus your energy where it counts:
On yourself,
On the real world
On the things that you can control
It’s the only way to live a real life.
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