I spend a great amount of time on the internet. Sometimes it’s mindless scrolling, sometimes it’s for finding specific information but often times I scroll the internet to observe the world.
Who is posting these days? What is being posted these days? And most importantly, how are people reacting to the posts?
Over the last few months (I can’t believe it’s not years, cuz it certainly feels like years) there have been a vibrating amount of hot topics on the internet. I name it vibrating because if a big story was coming up every few days or so, it would be like the stories are pulsating. These days the frequency at which the new stories are coming up is so high, it feels like vibrations.
Firing! Zelensky! Defunding! Raiding! Tariffs! No tariffs! No Kings! Lawmakers being assassinated! Epstein! Bitcoin! Israel! The list goes on and on and the consequences of each story stop mattering now because we have about 5 new events that pop up while we wait for the consequences.
It is important to recognize that our attention is being dragged away every time something new comes up. And because the rate of these events are so fast it is more and more taxing to our energy reservoir to keep up with recent events. And at this point I need to say something a bit extreme: your attention is being grabbed by the *****.
But just like how you need to be able to defend yourself in the face of physical harm, we must also be able to defend ourselves in the face of disinformation and attention theft. Your attention is a very treasured resource. Attacking your attention is the first entryway into attacking all the other parts of you.
I wrote about how I got street-scammed in Paris. If someone took my money in plain sight, there’s no way I would let that happen. But what if my attention is taken away? That’s precisely what the scam artists did.
I recently went to a series of magic shows. And what do all magic shows start with? Misdirection. Same with street hypnosis. When people have your attention, they practically gain an entryway into you. This is why hooks are so important in marketing.
My wife attended a self-defense class and the class started by the most important principle of self-defense: don’t get into situations where you need self-defense by staying aware of your surroundings.
When you don’t have your attention, you’re not living your life. But it’s not all bad news. The good news is that when you cultivate your mindfulness and get used to staying in touch with your inner awareness, you will develop a kind of a spider-sense when your attention is drifting away.
How can you not? Every day when you meditate you’re practicing coming back to your point of focus. And you can only do that if you notice when your attention is being drifted away. Sometimes you’ll still lose your attention, like I did in Paris, but we all need to experience some learning curves one way or another. You’ll do a lot of damage reduction by keeping in touch with your attention.
One nuance to keep in mind for these times: I heard a sentence recently, “when you watch the news you’re misinformed; when you don’t watch the news you’re uninformed”. This sounds like something relevant for these times but it is actually timeless, the fact that watching the news is getting a snapshot of reality instead of the whole reality.
You can totally watch the news and understand the bigger picture by zooming out of the frame of someone is speaking about something, into observing that something and that someone. What has happened, in terms of observable events? Why did this happen, more specifically — what were the conditions that gave arising to this? What preconditions were required for this to happen?
Why is this person in particular speaking about this? Why would they speak in these terms, with these tones? What is the need for this message to come out? These analytic questions can help you understand the grand flow of world events instead of piecewise skewed representations of said world events.
Your mind is the most important treasure you have access to. Protect it, defend your attention.
