Hello everyone, please be patient with my first diary. I have some conclusions and a final call to action I’d like to share.
Fact: The human brain prioritizes the urgent over the important, and always will prioritize the present over the future. That’s why we all struggle to balance immediate needs or crises at the expense of long-term planning and solutions. Let’s use health and fitness as example:
- Urgent: Opting for fast food because it's convenient and quick, despite knowing it’s unhealthy.
- Important: Planning and preparing nutritious meals that contribute to long-term health.
Ok, stay with me.
After the Presidential Debate, I fell into a bit of despair and focused on The News. Actually, I consumed a lot of The News. My mind was hungry for more of The News.
(What is The News, anyway?)
I gave in as my mind sought more of The News to find some shred of information that would make me feel better, an explanation that would provide comfort, looking for a life preserver floating in the tsunami waves of media excrement that washed in an battered us all. Instead, The News increased my despair.
(Did anyone else have this feeling?)
It’s just like eating a bunch of fast food to try and feel satisfied!
Let’s reframe health and fitness into our diet of The News:
- Urgent: Consuming sensationalist headlines and clickbait articles because they are immediately available and quickly satisfy the need for updates, even though they often lack depth and accuracy.
- Important: Curating a balanced news diet by seeking out well-researched articles from reputable sources, taking time to understand complex issues, and cross-referencing information to ensure accuracy and comprehensiveness.
The problem: The News is now mostly an online phenomenon, even “television” is delivered over the internet. Your clicks and views are processed and analyzed by powerful algorithms. The News is beholden to Big Tech, and via social media, The News was transformed by Big Tech. Consequently, it all has experienced a degradation and rot known as enshittification, and the centralized control and scale available to technology platforms make all of it very vulnerable to manipulation (Exhibit A: Twitter. Exhibit B: AI, and Exhibit C: ChatGPT). Furthermore, apps and platforms are designed to be immersive and addictive in the first place.
Facts: Platforms want clicks. Platforms are manipulated. How many “news stories” have you seen that just recycle something from Twitter, or re-tell a story from the New York Times?
- Conclusion 1: This is not a “nutritious” news diet. It is recycled content designed for an emotional effect. It feels lousy because it’s not good for mental health and well-being. Therefore, we cannot rely on The News to provide an accurate accounting of the current state of affairs, without looking at the controlling interest behind the platforms and composition of our news diets.
- Conclusion 2: I fell prey to media manipulation (dare I say propaganda) after the Presidential Debate. The despair was the point! Upset people don't unify, organize, and might not go out and vote! Feel demotivated? Why is that? Where did that come from?
- FINAL Conclusion 3: Go vote. And vote for a Biden-Harris administration*. The “Biden is old” tsunami was by design to activate the urgent part of your brain and overcome what is IMPORTANT.
By the way, do you know the mental hack (or, one weird trick) to start saving more money for retirement, begin eating better, and feel motivated to exercise? It is to take one minute a day and … deliberately imagine your future self. Ask yourself, “how will I feel if… “ Your brain only knows you right now. It takes deliberate thought and executive function to have a concept of you in the future and act accordingly for your future self.
Let’s try it now:
Imagine your future self in late November. Seriously, try to imagine yourself waking up a few months from now. Some questions:
- How will you feel if Project 2025 is in the first stages of execution? (Remember the first few months of the Trump administration?)
- What will you wish you could have done?
You know there are things you can do NOW:
First, if you are doom scrolling, decide to stop.
Second, I’ll be blunt: Decide to vote Biden-Harris, and consider what else you can do to motivate others. Everything after that can be negotiated in the political system. But— if Project 2025 happens, the system will no longer exist as you know it. The courts are already stacked and ready to rubber stamp an authoritarian social revolution. (And that’s why I decided to create an account and begin writing here after lurking for more than a decade.)
If you made it this far, I thank you for reading. Stay strong and hold fast.
*Note: we are voting for an administration. Which group of people do *you* want running things?