Lately I have come to notice that I’ve defined myself as being bleak. That is because my life has felt quite bleak for a while now. However, that is not all of it. Covid-19 kept most of us at home and uncovered a great deal of nastiness that was lurking in our collective subconscious. I’m largely empathic by nature and I am feeling the weight of the world around me and I tell you, it is not good.
We are happiest when we are able to direct rage at something or someone. We are a species of blame, and here in America we have a media mechanism that serves to amplify that blame. I am blaming the media. The purpose of the media is twofold: Inform the public & Make money. The second purpose is unquestionable. Outside of C-Span and NPR, everyone is in it for profit. It is funny to me that those two (particularly NPR) are seen as bastions of liberalism. In fact, it is often those with an agenda to shape the news that scream the loudest about others shaping the news and about how fair and balanced they themselves are. In this way the argument is tainted to assure their viewers and readers that the point of view they project is balanced and anything to the left or right of that is clearly skewed.
People are largely sheep in this sense. We want to live in a filter bubble composed of the reality that best suits our present beliefs and belief system. We want to be led and to forget about the things that we don’t want to think about or at least criminalize and demonize them in a way that projects them as the other. This is what happens on the media feeds every day and in every way. This is part of the weight I carry because I tune in. I take in as much of it as I can and I know it is bullshit, yet I carry it around inside my head and get angry or sad because it does, in fact, exist.
What is my alternative? Tune out? Only tune in to the stuff that makes me feel good? Find the closest signal to what I perceive as ‘middle’ as I can? Does my reading of AP and Reuters somehow eliminate the reality of OANN and NewsMax? Does it make CNN make sense? I’m not even prepared to discuss what happens on Discord, Snapchat, and Instagram–where most of our young go for information.
Instead I swallow it all down like castor oil for the soul, except it is not making me better. It is making me worse. It is draining me. It is affecting my ability to function, to do anything that isn’t checking out entirely on this reality. All of my problems are not this. However, this problem exists and it is slowly killing me.