Everything is a contest to get you to pay your attention toward watching, looking at, reading, whatever particular thing.
Outrage is the best way to get you to pay attention.
But when you’ve spent your attention on being outraged… your brain tricks you.
You’ve had the experience of being outraged… you felt it, you feel like you understand the thing, experienced the thing… contemplated the thing… even like you acted in some way about the thing.
But 99.9% chance… you did nothing other than absorb information and have emotions about it. Maybe you also posted a reaction comment or video of some kind… but you didn’t do anything tangible about it, something that might alleviate the conditions that led to this outrageous thing being a thing, or its likelihood of recurring.
You didn’t actually do anything about it… but you feel like you did.
This is why people get nutty about fandoms, have parasocial relationships with e-personalities, get legitimately fatigued from so much bad news.
There has to be a balance, you have to retain actual self control and self awareness. Otherwise, you’re a zombie that thinks you’re morally superior to other zombies, and you’ll sleepwalk toward what the algorithm wants you to…
When you could have, at some point, turned off the screen and… meditated, read a book, gone for a hike or jog, planted a garden, maintained your car… even gasp had a face to face interaction with a random person.
They want us atomized, exhausted, existentially despairing.
Such people won’t be capable of doing anything about anything.
If you want to stay Christian about it:
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
… Not actually in the Bible. A Lutheran pastor came up with it in the 1930s.
Though I personally disagree with the less often quoted second part of it, which echoes your quoted verses of Jesus saying to more or less be right with God and focus on that… seems to imply that all suffering is unavoidable, and of course that you’ll be better off in Heaven… which I do not think is the case.
But, I can at least say that I think the first part is pretty close to spot on.
We live in the digital attention economy.
We literally pay … attention.
Everything is a contest to get you to pay your attention toward watching, looking at, reading, whatever particular thing.
Outrage is the best way to get you to pay attention.
But when you’ve spent your attention on being outraged… your brain tricks you.
You’ve had the experience of being outraged… you felt it, you feel like you understand the thing, experienced the thing… contemplated the thing… even like you acted in some way about the thing.
But 99.9% chance… you did nothing other than absorb information and have emotions about it. Maybe you also posted a reaction comment or video of some kind… but you didn’t do anything tangible about it, something that might alleviate the conditions that led to this outrageous thing being a thing, or its likelihood of recurring.
You didn’t actually do anything about it… but you feel like you did.
This is why people get nutty about fandoms, have parasocial relationships with e-personalities, get legitimately fatigued from so much bad news.
There has to be a balance, you have to retain actual self control and self awareness. Otherwise, you’re a zombie that thinks you’re morally superior to other zombies, and you’ll sleepwalk toward what the algorithm wants you to…
When you could have, at some point, turned off the screen and… meditated, read a book, gone for a hike or jog, planted a garden, maintained your car… even gasp had a face to face interaction with a random person.
They want us atomized, exhausted, existentially despairing.
Such people won’t be capable of doing anything about anything.
If you want to stay Christian about it:
… Not actually in the Bible. A Lutheran pastor came up with it in the 1930s.
Though I personally disagree with the less often quoted second part of it, which echoes your quoted verses of Jesus saying to more or less be right with God and focus on that… seems to imply that all suffering is unavoidable, and of course that you’ll be better off in Heaven… which I do not think is the case.
But, I can at least say that I think the first part is pretty close to spot on.