After a week of writing entries on this site, researching and avoiding all media, I felt pretty good.
You could attribute the feeling to just having a clearer head, but this satisfaction welled up from an entirely different ordeal:
Independence.
Always so used to being connected, always need to be in the know, etc, etc, and what does it get you?
If anything I felt as though someone had puppet strings on me. Just print whatever will incite the most fear, and we’ll all let it percolate around in a strange hope that it’ll do something different. Or we’ll continue to report the state of the water in our forums, and maybe one day the temperature will change instead of grabbing a blowtorch.
What am I getting at? It threads nicely with the dissonance; talking bad stuff don’t do much. Why worry over things you have no control over? We talk and chant doom is near, but if it is or it isn’t, in either case prepare your bed or plant some flowers!
But it’s not just about talking of bad stuff: it’s talking at all! Talking too much means more talking and less doing. So in a mini-retrospective, I’m wondering if I’m typing too much and doing too little. In a mini-retrospective, I wonder what exactly am I up to, beyond hoping that there’s something I can harvest from all of this random thought. Although somewhat succeeding with this net detox stuff, I find myself receding deeper into my mind without an exit.
In either case, I’m not going to dance to someone else’s tune! and I suggest you don’t either! We’re quite influencable, very much so: who you expose yourself to is who you become.
With that out of the way, there’s another aspect about disconnection, a terrifying realization. I’ll attempt to grapple with now:
Although now I avoid all media, it does not mean those I talk to avoid it either. By extension, I could very well get infected with news just by interacting with other people. This rose up conflicted feelings; what is one to do?
I guess the only thing left to do is to avoid such topics at all costs, and such people too if they’re too invested. It’s just hard; just by visiting some sites I’ve banned in this day 7 round-trip, for five minutes or less, I was exposed once more to news. More and more I am compelled to never open the browser to browse ever again. More and more I am proven that this decision is the right one.
Well, it seems like I’m championing ignorance here, and yeah, you could say I am. But I don’t think there’s much point to reading any news. It’s mostly propaganda, driven for profit, and, when you think of all of the news you’ve ever read, did you really get anything out of it? I didn’t :-)
I accept my title as a willfully ignorant dunce!
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.
Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet. They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.
— Edward Bernays, Propaganda
Do you want to be molded? Or do you want to mold yourself?