By “Agenda,” I mean your personal agenda — the tasks that you set for yourself to accomplish by the end of the day. Do you set that agenda, or does someone else?
Because of the way that our minds work, we can only hold so many ideas and trains of thought in our mind at the same time. When you start your day by bathing in whatever story some other unfathomable confluence of interest groups has decided to bathe you in, you cede control of your life — as you actually live it — to someone else.
You’re, by no means, immune to this in any social context or in any system of government. Civilized men are not especially isolated creatures. It’s important for us to understand what’s going on in our communities and areas of interest. This tendency of ours — the social instinct — has been ably hijacked by ‘user interface designers,’ software developers, and hacks like yours truly to keep people on a never-ending loop of checking what other people are thinking and doing in the moment. Joining that group are television producers, movie people, magazine editors, and all the rest of them eager to buy a slice of your thoughts.
Simply disconnecting from the larger herd — and perhaps focusing on the smaller herd of your family, or even of the people whom you need to work with throughout your day — is a better way to take control of your thoughts, and by taking control of your thoughts, you’ll have better control over your actions. When you have more control over your actions, you also have more control over your environment.
Exercising this control is something that I sometimes struggle with, personally, because of a bottomless curiosity and desire to understand the world as it is. But to be free in a meaningful sense is to be comfortable being ignorant about the majority of what exists. Most people in the world speak in languages unintelligible to us, in a social context completely alien to our understanding. It’s easy to fool ourselves that we understand — or that we can understand — because we can use simple theories, encyclopedia articles, and newspaper reports that go through several cycles of translation to think that we know what’s going on beyond our area of awareness.
Proactively deciding what to be ignorant about is probably more important than deciding what you ought to know. It’s by ignoring most things that you generate the free mental space and time to grasp what you actually need to know.
Very true. Whether it is done out of necessity or out of desire to be spared the weight of its implications for a while, disconnecting from the larger herd as you say, can sometimes be pretty hard. The innumerable points of views on the current state of things in the history of our world create a kind of fascination. There is curiosity in it, there is this desire to understand the world as it is, and I believe also, to catch a few glimmers of hope in a context that tends to lack it.
At this point I can pretty much ignore most of what is going through the Narrative, as the stories that are worth relaying are being echoed on our side one way or another. It spares a lot of time to focus on what is interesting.
I am close on 80,live with my wife in France next to an Islamic family which farms.
I make my own agenda which my wife ruins now and again to take her somewhere.
I am strongly thinking of suing myself for abuse and “hurt feelings”
Bruce Charlton’s Addicted to Distraction is an excellent read. His thesis is that the media cannot help but be leftist and anti tradition, because it must always be pushing something new and different.
Stay away from the glowing screens. Of course, here I am in front of a glowing screen telling you this as you sit in front of one. At least you should limit your time captive in front of a glowing screen. Get rid of your smart phone. Carrying around your own personal little glowing screen is bad news. People can’t even speak to each other any more. The damn things will be the death knell of civilization.
It was worth reading.