The Therapeutic Effects Of Tuning Out

I have been going through a lot of what can only be defined as intellectual turmoil these days.
I’m sure I am not alone in this.
As a writer, part of my job is to pay attention to the world and all the things that are happening in it.
Theoretically, this provides me with some perspective and a way to actually understand just where things are at these days.
The idea behind this is to be able to reflect what I know in the posts that I write and to some extent in the marketing work that I do as well.

On the surface, and I postulate that no intelligent human being can disagree with this, the inmates very much appear to be running the asylum.

I know the world has always been a crazy place. And maybe it’s actually no crazier that it ever has been.

But the simple fact that news of all this craziness can reach us though dozens of different media 24 hours a day has had the tendency the magnify these events, by making the world seem like a much smaller place than it actually is.

There is a scientific theory which roughly states that the outcome of any experiment can be affected by the simple fact of its being observed.

I really do believe that is what’s happening to the world these days.

Our observations of world events and our ability to offer and proliferate opinions on them, with all our biases built in, have sharpened both edges of the blade.

You can have a crazy person in power, and we currently have several of them, the world, probably more, and the fact that their craziness is being both criticized and defended 24/7 can easily cause you an incredible amount of intellectual turmoil, provided you are: A) paying attention and b) not an idiot.

Intelligent people tend to get very uneasy if they pay too much attention to the news. Idiots, on the other hand, tend to become loyal to the person who shouts the loudest.

Neither situation is ideal.

Because now, you have the intelligent people and the idiots at loggerheads with each other, and both have the ability to sling arrows at each other thanks to the fact that communication has become a total two-way street.

The Only Solution At The Moment Is Dropping Out

This week, after a year and a half of going after the con man who was elected president of the Agitated States of America, the intellectual turmoil I had been feeling all along manifested itself in a very positive way.

I positively determined that nothing I was saying was having even the slightest effect on the people I wanted to reach. The simple reason is that they have become intractable. And I felt I was becoming that way too.

Then I saw a comment on one of my posts on LinkedIn where the commentor explained that he believed I was wasting a lot of bandwidth that I could be putting to better use than to get a bunch of idiots to change their minds and shift their blind allegiance.

For some reason that kind of stopped me in my tracks, and brought about one of those rare moments of clarity.

He was right. I was doing nothing more than banging my head against the wall, and maybe doing a whole lot of singing to the choir.

So later in the week, I created a final meme in this series.

I find it profoundly sad that the world has become a place where so many people have pretty much lost the ability to at least consider opinions that are different from those they hold to be true.

I’ll be honest with you. Every time I hear Trump speak, I listen carefully. My intellect works very hard to try to get something positive out of what he’s saying. I really do.

But his problem is that he does not know how to be diplomatic. He does not know how to be empathetic. He doesn’t not know how to embrace the entire population of his country. He does not know how to be fair minded and egalitarian.

And, most critically, he does not know what he does not know.

The same can be said of many other leaders around the world.

They have no emotional intelligence. They lack the ability to see both sides of an issue. And they are so self-obsessed that they will never change their basic stance to anything that does not have to do with self-aggrandizement.

When I realized this, it hit me like a ton of bricks.

And the way forward for me was clear. Over and out.

This does not mean that I have stopped caring. What it does mean is that I’m going to be more mindful of how I use my time going forward.
Because aside from the gestalt of getting a good deal of frustration out of my system, which I probably could have done with a hefty primal scream or two, it was kind of a useless and pointless exercise that simply attracted the intractable and showcased their inability to look at both sides of an issue. Which is really more a sadness than anything else. 

I no longer wish to be sad about the world. Mainly because my little corner of it is pretty much OK.
Maybe if I just work on making sure that things are OK there, I can actually have more impact than I can from shouting at a massive brick wall.
We shall see.

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