This is a great long thread about strategies for coping with uncertainty. It touches on similiar strategies I’ve talked about here and elsewhere about how to navigate a world where every step you take feels like trying to navigate a sea of quicksand. I learned a lot the first time round when we had a mad administration. This time I had a plan in place: and it has WORKED.
It was:
- 1. Focus on what you can control.
- 2. Limit your inputs
When discussing this strategy I’ve run into a lot of folks desperate for news. My suggestion is the one I just gave my mom, which is to watch PBS News Hour once per day. They will have had time to collect the day’s events into a cogent narrative instead of disjointed headlines. And there’s few ads
I spent first 25 years of my life getting news once a day – max!!! – at 6am or 6pm and it was fine. Better than, really, because there had been hours between events to build them into a cogent narrative that was more likely to have been verified. We aren’t made for doomscrolling. It makes us unwell.
I was talking with a coworker who said he felt bad for turning everything off and I said, “Dude, we’re in MARKETING. We know how this works! We are literally the people designing the ads and narratives that capture people’s attention. We KNOW how much of it is literally designed for max hysteria.”
Worse, the firehose does NOT – contrary to what media wants us to believe – make us more likely to DO something. It fractures and fragments our attention so we can’t focus on ANYTHING. We don’t think. We REACT. We get overwhelmed, which makes us depressed and anxious, and MORE LIKELY TO DO NOTHING.
There’s this theory that some forms of depression are survival mechanisms that are triggered when we’re confronted with overwhelming powers/people. It drains our energy, flattens us out, makes us submissive and lethargic because that behavior says “I am not a threat to you. Please don’t hurt me.” Showing submission helped us survive encounters with big bullies.
Mainlining disjointed bits of information is making us WEAKER and LESS resilient. As a marketer who wants you constantly engaged with my ads or my app, I don’t want you to know this. I want you to feel your life is incomplete if you aren’t constantly engaged with my content.
But by constantly being engaged with my content, you also don’t have the time to take a breath and figure out what YOU think. You don’t get opportunity to think DEEPLY. To come up with SOLUTIONS. You’re so exhausted you can barely turn on Netflix.
I know. I was there, for years, with Netflix and a drink.
Being hooked into the attention economy didn’t make me a better person. I didn’t DO more. I did LESS. I slept a lot. I despaired. I barely wrote. My health went off a cliff. The internet is a series of lead tubes, and it’s killing us. But I sure was ENGAGED!
There’s a way through, but it’s not a way that anyone makes easy for us. The overlords designed it to make us so reliant on being hooked in that we CAN’T disengage. And yet! Turning everything off in Nov was one of the best things I ever did for myself, and allowed me a hard reset. I was SO PRODUCTIVE (I FINISHED MY BOOK!!!).
Learning that lesson was key for me. Getting OUTSIDE MY HOUSE and among REAL PEOPLE every weekend also helped. Our increasing disconnection from other humans means we’re spending more time in worlds we’ve constructed in our own heads from Internet headlines designed to get fiery engagement.
And while that’s A world, it’s not THE world.
There are very few things we can control right now. But we can control our inputs. Our attention. We can focus on and control HOW WE SPEND OUR TIME. That’s a precious resource. The only one, really.
Why give away your time to these people, when the greatest act of resistance is taking it back?
