I was trying to use the news to come up with a solid topic to discuss for ten minutes tonight, but I just cannot. The news sucks. The entirety of our media cycle these days is predicated on divisiveness, sex, and other tricks to get clicks. Hardly any of it is worth the view, and the news that is worthwhile generally gets lost in an avalanche of nonsense. Yet I am afraid to stop watching less I miss the one thing that is actually important.
I feel like our modern society is making us weak and weak-minded. This feels tangential to a great number of things, but I will give you one brief example: I lose my phone every week. Once, I was strong minded enough to know where my phone always was the way I once was able to always find my keys (another step towards the memory loss disease?). I lose my phone because I know that I don’t need to apply memory cycles to remembering where it is. I can just call up an app on another device to tell my phone to beep until found. Simple.
Degrading. Not to me as a person but to my memory and sense of value of memory. The news as it is is degrading to what news ought to be and to the sense of value we offer news. It has lost a great deal of its value in my eyes and I am still an avid follower. What about those of us who really don’t care? How are you informed? Who is informing you? What is their motivation?
These are the questions that keep me up at night.