We currently live in an information age. With a tap of the screen, billions of search results are available to us. But do we really need instantaneous access to all this information?
I try to minimize my use of social media and artificial intelligence because the systems they’re founded on go against my principles.
Eros, Inferno of the same, difference, serendipity, surprises.
Doomscrolling and asking ChatGPT are the easy choice. But I don’t want easy, I want a challenge. Synthesize and make my own. Training my brain like a muscle. I recently started doing drop sets to failure. Yeah, I’ll admit, I want to look super strong. But beneath that, I want to push myself to the limit to know that, yes, I can do it, even when it hurts so bad. Training my willpower.
Denial of instant gratification. “Will this action make the future easier or harder?”
The flesh all around me is willing, Angelo, but there is no spirit anywhere.
In brief, humans aren’t necessary for garbage production anymore. Machines work just as well. Display items on shop counters doze in the alluring glare of artificial light, dreaming of garbage bins. Automatic teller machines hum silently. Money is circulating. Lights in offices turn off during lunch hours. There is nothing to remind us of humans anymore, just as there is nothing to remind us of yesterday’s garbage.
We’re eating garbage! Digital garbage.
I want to be in control of my own attention. I decide what I want to allocate it to. I want to actively seek information out, not passively consume it. Walking through bookstores, going down research rabbit holes, rejecting AI — Framing - it is not what you say, but how you say it, whose perspectives are we conforming to? Whose truth are we hearing?
People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
Lost in my dreams, I somehow cross at the traffic signals, never bumping into street lamps or people, yet moving onward, exuding fumes of beer and grime, yet smiling, because my briefcase is full of books and that very night I expect them to tell me things about myself I don’t know. (Too Loud a Solitude)
The task of inner work is often neglected, and it’s so much easier to drown it out with all the noise. We are our own first creations. Care, nourish, grow. Life isn’t about material striving, but about living. And we can only live in peace with ourselves if we work on ourselves.
thoughts
- Information Age
- Algorithms and affective manipulation
- Veneration of the material
- Too Loud a Solitude
- Information bias - more information doesn’t mean better decisions
- The overabundance of information gives the illusion of a static and predetermined, rather than spontaneous, life
- Encouraging conformity
- Self-centered bubble
- Echo chambers
- “All eyes on me”
- technofeudalism and the death of serendipity
- https://www.bellalee.com/blog/posts/the-record-of-us-all
- Mindfulness, awareness, stillness
- You’re Not Addicted to Content, You’re Starving for Information - YouTube
research
- Human attention span
- Psychology of memory
- Philosophy of memory, time, and space
- The Burnout Society
solution
- Intentional consumption
- We’re selective about what we eat, so why not about the information we consume?
- Active learning
- Regaining autonomy in a system that rewards passivity