Psych'd Up
You are what you do, and second to that is that you are what you think. Here’s why you should stop reading websites like this, stop reading twitter, stop reading substack. It’s not just because you’re substituting doing with knowledge, it’s because acquisition is what orients you.
It’s the same reason that you shouldn’t watch the news. “That sounds like you’re encouraging ignorance.”
Sorry? What? What do you gain out of learning the surface level, propagandised details of an event in a country across the entire world? Even if what they were telling you was true, does it matter? What could you do with that information? Well, I guess you can peacock to your friends that you are politically informed, socially in-the-know.
When you listen to anything telling you to care about something else, especially the abstract, what you are being told is: you don’t matter. You should care about your faults and issues. That doesn’t mean make them a personality, it means solve them. You can’t solve the forever war. You can’t solve world hunger. We’ve poured trillions into Africa over 30 years and it’s still a starving, war-ridden continent full of disease. Some people just have BMW’s now. Good for them, I suppose.
“Oh but I don’t do that. I don’t watch the news. That’s for boomers.”
Yeah, you read Twitter, X, the everything app, or whatever other infinite scrolling mess of crafted algorithms to sate your need for a permanent state of brain buzz. The app that tells you everything, so you don’t have to think about yourself, about what you can actually fix, the actual every thing that matters. There’s another culture war article, another celebrity turned out to be a paedophile, people are being stupid again, but that’s okay, because you aren’t, you’re just watching people be stupid. Ha! You’re better than them! That’s why you spend hours each day reading about things that don’t matter and you can’t change, because you’re just that much better. You’re enlightened, you’re different, you’re in-the-know and you can talk to all your other friends who are the same. As long as everyone is doing the wrong thing and being stupid, it’s okay for you to pretend that what you’re doing (nothing) is okay.
Could be worse, I suppose. You could be the person who’s writing blogs for the people who need precisely that kind of avoidance.