Battling for Your Mind

In all that happens, keep before your eyes those who experienced it before you, and felt shock and outrage and resentment at it.

And now where are they? Nowhere.

Is that what you want to be like? Instead of avoiding all these distracting assaults--leaving the alarms and flight to others--and concentrating on what you can do with it all?

Because you can use it, treat it as raw material. Just pay attention, and resolve to live up to your own expectations. In everything. And when faced with a  choice, remember: our business is with things that really matter.

Meditations

Marcus Aurelius

We now live in The Age of Distraction. We are glued to screens that keep feeding us completely random information. We turn on our computers and immediately jump to something that starts feeding us the day's stories. Then we spend the day jumping from topic to topic with no objective, no purpose. Would you allow a person to walk up to you every minute and start a new conversation that had nothing to do with what you were just thinking about? We are fed political news, cultural news, pop news, business news, celebrity sightings, and on and on and on... And then, suddenly, with our brains buzzing we prepare to end our day and it's all a blur of, basically, nothing. We spent the day lost in some illusion of activity, but in the end nothing really happened that had any impact. We made progress on nothing, never completed an original thought, never acted upon an original desire, our day was pulled together by some algorithm that likely already has things lined up for tomorrow and beyond. Through the day we never had a single original thought or asked ourselves if this is the way to live? Is this what we were meant to do: spend our lives trapped in random triviality, perpetually distracted? 

Perhaps it's time to unplug the apps, turn off the news, and revert back to a time when we directed our own minds. We should not spend our entire lives thinking about things that don't really matter, thinking about things that were fed to us by the corporate advertising machine. We have a choice to live our own lives, drive our own thoughts and interests, and not simply give away our time, our minds,our lives. Be well.