The world may have flooded long ago, ripping away and changing most features of the earth’s features, but we currently live in a world inundated by mostly useless information.
To keep from being swept away, we have to drive stakes into essential tasks, less we spend our limited time on earth completing worthless tasks.
There’s never been more distractions from what really matters.
The internet is a portal to infinite information relative to one’s age span– from dogs videos to microbiology to QAnon conspiracy theories.
In the eerie words of Mark Manson’s book “Everything is F*cked”:
“Today’s tyranny is achieved by flooding people with so much diversion, so much bullshit information and frivolous distraction, that they are unable to make smart commitments.”
You could easily fill up your day completing tasks that have no benefit years later.
You could take home achievements on Call of Duty, gain 15,000 Linkedin followers, have a killer Instagram game, and still be in an unhappy career and marriage.
Incredible achievements surround us: vaccines preventing lifelong, painful illnesses like polio, stoplights preventing horrible crashes, and wifi and Facetime connecting families divided by hundreds of miles.
We live in a world of prosperity, but many people are still unhappy.
America’s poor families have a much higher standard of living than other countries, including larger houses than “rich” Europeans, a car, air conditioning, and cable TV.
Don’t get me wrong– we still have problems, but we live in a dream compared to the standard of living a 100 years ago.
So much that now, we have to enact limitations to ensure we make smart commitments: like only drinking alcohol on weekends, or setting time locks for 30 minutes on social media apps, or only eating a certain amount of sugar per day.
With all the distractions in the world, we can’t stand to be alone or analyze ourselves, because we’re used to constant stimulation designed to be easy, like neverending scrolling on Twitter.
If you want to see what I mean, start meditating for just 10 minutes a day, or more if you can bear it.
Most humans have lists of causes for which they advocate: social equality, ending homelessness, and no-kill shelters.
But recently, people feel the need to take up every trending cause on Twitter, even the ones they don’t know enough information to advocate for, an unsustainable task.
This never-ending to-do list diverts efforts from bettering yourself– from health, to causes you actually support (instead what’s popular) through volunteer work, to career plan.