The more I react to hysterics and haters, the more exhausted and bitter I become too.
Tag: social media
Her attention made it swell
Ours is an old, old story with an interesting new wrinkle. Throughout most of our history, nothing — not flood, famine, plague, or new weapons — has endangered humanity one-tenth as much as the narcissistic ego, with its self-aggrandizing presumptions and its hell-hound spawn of fear and greed.
The new wrinkle is that escalating advances in technology are nourishing the narcissistic ego the way chicken manure nourishes a rose bush, while exploding worldwide population is allowing its effects to multiply geometrically.
Here’s an idea: let’s get over ourselves, reduce our carbon footprint, adopt an animal from a shelter, go buy a cherry pie, and fall in love with life.
-Tom Robbins in an interview by Tony Vigorito
The stream has become a river
and the river an ocean, the currents and tides more powerful than me.
“We are in the midst of a momentous event in the evolution of human consciousness, but they won’t be talking about it in the news tonight” -Eckhart Tolle
The media isn’t feeding me calm. It’s giving me excitement, constantly. So now I’m constantly treading water, head bent up, mouth barely above the water.
“Open up your mind, in pours the trash.” -Meat Puppets
The information age has empowered everyone. How to use that power determines your quality of life, and our evolution of consciousness.
Where are you directing your power?
The reassuring noise of the hive
(35 seconds to read)
Many inputs into my life. The mixture is becoming more rich in social media. As it does, it dilutes me, my being, my originality. My self still peeps…as I struggle to find it in the noise.
The pathways of my brain become a slippery erase board of values, based on what the collective thinks, and so my mind gets pulled towards the hive. It’s like a black hole, and I’m stretching now, pulled into strings of psyche that are unrecognizable from my true form.
It is a powerful force, based on the concentrated mass of humanity, a crushing and relentless gravity. Ironically it’s not mindful, as it spews thoughts, observations, accusations, churning like the waves of the ocean, it throws us up, spins us around, and sucks us down without direction.
And with our equilibrium shattered and compass gone, we’re left wandering, thinking our focus is focused, but actually it’s the Generality we’ve reached, the Reactionary Equilibrium between loneliness and psychotic connection.
Because being plugged in doesn’t bring you closer to others or to reality, unless you believe it. And that’s what the internet is doing: Making you believe things, rather than think things.
How to prevent the internet from becoming your time suck
The internet provides a lot of information and an almost infinite number of connections. The problem is it allows us to create an echo chamber with others who share our views or a place to seek conflict as a distraction from real life. For people without curiosity and open-mindedness, the internet serves to solidify their views and could even make them more extreme, whether it’s trying to debate the ethics of eating animals, or of giving the government more control over your life.
But the internet can also give you the opportunity to share ideas, and see how you are wrong, and create an expert network that is smarter than any one single authority. Will it alienate people defensively into the safety of numbers in their echo chamber or will it evolve society?
Regardless, the internet won’t make us smarter unless we want to be smarter. The danger is, will it make us stupider if we don’t care?
arabedrossian.org 