When people want to get healthy, they often talk about going on a diet. Eating organic. Avoiding junk food.

They look at the ingredients on the back of food at the store. “High-Fructose Corn Syrup”. Pass.

But what about your mental health? What about all the junk information we ingest every day?

Do you look at a news broadcast and think of all the side-effects? “Depression, anxiety, a warped view of the world. Being paralyzed into inaction by feeling like the world is spinning out of control.” Maybe if these labels were properly added to news segments fewer people would tune in.

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I turned off the news years ago. I don’t even own a TV. In fact in my entire adult life I’ve never owned a TV.

When I lived in the UK, the BBC tried to tax me. They were shocked when I told them I had no TV, so they couldn’t collect their “Television license” tax. (Some people have the gall to tell me the BBC isn’t state-run media!)

Of course, with the advent of the internet, you don’t need a TV to binge on junk information. It’s everywhere. Social media, ads, fake news sites. Alternative news is no better. It’s filled with the same doom and gloom as everywhere else.

Corporate and Alternative News - Two Sides of the Same Coin

What do you see when you turn on the corporate news? Crime. Tragedy. Some sick psychopath committed some horrible crime on the other side of the country and here it is, in detail, in your living room.

What do you see when you turn on the alternative news? More crime and tragedy. Plus a smattering of collapse. Corruption. The end of the world. Some new false flag conspiracy theory. “Food supplies are about to run out.” “We’re on the brink of WWIII.”

Now, I’m not saying civilization isn’t undergoing collapse. It is. But what’s worse is that this is entirely taken out of context (I’ll explain below).

And the collapse is very slow-motion, and not uniform at all. The “it’s ending next week” predictions are getting old, which somehow doesn’t stop the predictors from continuing to make them.

And we often forget that civilizations have collapsed many times before, and yet we’re still here. People can survive the degradation and eventual collapse of the systems around them. In fact, sometimes that’s required for new, better systems to be built and for people to thrive (though the transition is often rough).

Emotional Manipulation

The question is - what does all of this do to your mental health?

Pay attention to how you feel after you watch the news. Do you feel motivated to improve your life? Do you feel motivated to take action? When you see a headline that says Monsanto is poisoning your crops with glyphosate, do you decide you’re going to plant a garden? Or do you just share the news and then fall into depression and inaction?

Someone on Substack recently told me it’s irresponsible to have children because the world is too evil. They told me it’s the worst time in the world, ever. That things have never been this bad.

They’re wrong. Very wrong. But after a lifetime diet of looking at the news and indiscriminately ingesting garbage and junk information, they’ve been brainwashed into a completely false view of the world.

Do you know how much an animal has to be mentally abused to voluntarily decide not to procreate? Reproduction is the prime biological directive. Even ahead of survival, since survival is really just a means to an end, the end being reproduction.

To be so depressed and have such a bleak view of the world that you abandon all hope and live life as a shell of a human being is a sign of intense propaganda.

Doom and Gloom Super Spreaders

You’ve likely heard of viral super-spreaders, but the informational ones are perhaps far more dangerous.

See, this person didn’t just get depressed. They decided to spread the disinformation, the gloom. They go around offering unrequited advice to people to abandon all hope, to not have children, to exit out of productive society. Their indoctrination is so complete that they’re spreading the lies, for free.

The Truth

This is actually one of the best times to be alive, ever.

Yes, we have problems. Every time period in human history and pre-history has had problems. Yes, some things are getting worse.

But we’re living in one of the safest times ever. Look at this chart showing crime rates from Pew research.

Since the 90’s, crime, across the board, has plunged. In fact, murder rates are the lowest they’ve been in 125 years.

But then look at this chart.

So even though crime rates have been consistently going down for 30 years, the perception of crime has actually gone up! Americans are safer than they have been in decades and yet they feel less safe.

I know people who are scared to go out on the streets because of all the fear-mongering they’ve seen on the news.

We Live Better than Kings

Here’s the other thing people are missing: gratitude.

Most of us take our air-conditioning for granted. We take our food abundance for granted.

The fact is that for the vast majority of human history, people have not had a reliable food supply. Famine was common.

People complain about vaccines and children getting sick (and fair enough), but they forget that for the vast majority of human history infant mortality was sky-high.

In the 18th century, about 40% of children died before even reaching adulthood. Paul Revere had 16 kids, of which 5 died as children.

Most of us work 5 days a week and get a weekend. Tell someone from 200 years ago that you’re so productive that you can rest two whole days a week and they’d be shocked.

Could our society be even better if we shrugged off the parasites in government? Yes.

Could our children be healthier if the food supply was clean of pesticides and GMOs, and they stopped getting vaccinated and over-prescribed antibiotics? Yes.

Are we living in one of the best times anyway? Yes.

It’s so easy to focus on the problems we have and forget to be grateful for the amazing luxury most of us live in.

The Kings and Queens of the 19th century and before would have killed for air-conditioning. Now, the average middle class family takes it for granted and think it’s a great burden when it breaks down for a few days until a guy comes out and repairs it.

If you have a child today, they’re more likely to survive into adulthood and live a healthy and happy life than at almost any other time in human history.

Despite what you’ve read on the news, the streets are safer now than they have been in decades. Crime rates are going down, even as the empire is in slow-motion collapse; which is surprising to me, but this just goes to show that society is complex and too many people are trying to simplify things to the point that they’re no longer truthful or accurate.

So turn off the news, and the next time you read or watch something, think:

1. Who put out this information?

2. Why did they put out this information? What is their purpose?

3. How did I feel before and after reading this information?

4. Is the information well sourced and factually provable or is it a bunch of conjecture?

5. If you were living 500 years ago and didn’t have access to “the news”, would you have ever found out that this event happened? If not, it’s probably not relevant to your life.

6. Are you feeling empowered or powerless to do something about what you just learned? Why?

If we’re going to treat our bodies as temples when it comes to the food we ingest, we should do the same with our minds.

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Speaking of taking action and being empowered - I’ve been building tools for people to exit the system and build a freer life for themselves. From relocating to a freer state and county and buying a property to homestead, to planning your garden. Check out all The Liberty Lookout projects here.

The Aimless Generations

I see generations of children growing up who never had to do anything as kids. I know because I’m one of them.

I grew up in a city. My parents did everything for me. Besides a handful of minor chores like taking out the trash and cleaning up my room, I was essentially not a helpful member of the household. It’s not because I was lazy - my parents didn’t want my help. And I’m not the only one. This is now the default.

Whole generations are growing up in cities where our lives are of no consequence until we suddenly become adults, and then we encounter the real world - big, scary, and anxiety-provoking. It took me years to overcome that, find my footing, and become a self-actualizing adult.

The real world doesn’t care for incompetent and incapable people. If you can’t look someone else in the eye and maintain a conversation, you will struggle to make friends, find a job, or even just function in society.

That’s why we see so many young adults who grew up not making their own food often default to eating out in college. After 18 years of life on this planet - they never learned the basic skill of cooking for themselves. Never mind critical thinking, map reading, budgeting, carpentry, bushcraft, or any number of other useful skills they should have been learning.

But that’s what childhood is for. It’s for experimenting, learning, doing, playing, and having purpose. That’s not something you’re meant to learn at 18 when you’re thrust into your first job, college, or a special “how to be an adult” program (yes, they’re real).

Our Job as Parents

As parents it’s easy for us to say, “I’ll just do it myself”, and exclude our kids from various tasks. It’s often faster to just get things done myself, right? But then I have to ask myself, why did I bother having kids if I’m just going to be impatient and rush off to do chores myself?

Every day I go to the garden my 3 year-old wants to come with me. He’s cute and I love his enthusiasm - but I also have to be patient as he takes several minutes to put on his shoes, gets distracted several times on the way there, and then whines about how it’s hot.

But when he comes back with a basket of vegetables for our family to eat, he has purpose. He’s learning. He’s helping. His life has meaning. And he gets to hang out with his dad.

The interesting thing is, sometimes he really does help. And if I didn’t give him a chance, he’d never be able to prove his value in the garden. And he’s just 3. Imagine what he could do when he’s 10!

We need to stop babying our children. Stop finishing hard tasks for them, or doing something for them because they’re taking “too long”. I’m not saying don’t help when they genuinely need help (they need to know they’ll get help when they need it and that we love them), but have discernment. Don’t rush in too quickly, let them try to finish a difficult thing first. Overcoming difficulty is how confidence is built.

Every cucumber picked, every screw tightened, every step stool moved - every little thing they do adds up. My kids, as little as they are, can independently go and feed our animals, let out the chickens, collect eggs, pick tomatoes, put on their own bandaids for each other, and so on.

Of course, if you live in a city, you might need to get creative. People aren’t meant to live in concrete boxes on top of each other, produce none of their own food, and be plugged into an endless entertainment machine all day long. They’re meant to wander, explore, build, sow, harvest. All of that requires a homestead. That’s one of the reasons we moved out of the city - I genuinely don’t think children can thrive growing up in that kind of environment.

When they grow up, my kids will have had an almost two-decade long track record of working hard, failing, trying again, and succeeding. Building self-confidence isn’t done overnight. It’s not done with a self-help book or a therapy session. It’s done one step at a time, proving to yourself that you can get things done, that you’re competent, and that what you do matters.

Don’t take that away from your children.

Is anyone else tired of the, “you’re not educated enough if you can’t read Greek and Latin,” posts that seem to be floating around Substack? I see them all the time now.

Underpinning every single one of them is a not-so-subtle undercurrent of “you suck”.

Here’s what I think is happening: a handful of people spent years of their childhood learning Greek and Latin. They were told this made them well-educated and smart. They then went out into the real world and realized that… nobody cares. Not even other well-educated and smart people.

What used to be a badge of intelligence in the 19th century is just not relevant anymore. Just like a college degree is no longer a meaningful badge.

These kids, who are now adults writing on Substack, were prepared for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Which is sad. Sad for them, and sad for the world, because these are smart people who put in the hours, they were just rowing in the wrong direction.

So now they’re mad. They’re mad that their schools or parents subjected them to years of learning largely pointless knowledge at the expense of learning something more valuable, or - you know - just being a kid and getting to play, which by the way is also valuable.

Everything has an opportunity cost, folks. There’s only 24 hours in a given day. If you’re learning Latin and Greek, you’re not learning French, Spanish, Algebra, budgeting, gardening, sewing, carpentry, music, how to run a business, or any number of other things. Your time and energy are finite.

So what do they do? Instead of placing the blame where it ought to go, they go on social media and try to virtue signal with their pretentious attitude, trying to make themselves feel better. It’s not that they wasted years of their childhood learning useless skills - no - it’s that you, all of you peasants out there - are simply not educated enough.

Self-knowledge is important, and some of these folks seem to be missing it.

Now - if you actually use Greek and Latin for some reason in your real life, perhaps you’re a translator, then great - that’s not a useless skill for you. But for the vast majority of people who learned it - it was a waste of time. Just because “classical” education made this part of the curriculum two hundred years ago, doesn’t mean it’s still valuable today.

I can read a perfectly reasonable translation of Plato’s “Republic”, and figure out that he was a big government statist who wanted to lord of everyone else, without having to learn Greek first. There’s two points I’m trying to make here:

1. Reading translations is perfectly fine. Yes, you might miss some nuance, but it’s probably not worth years of effort learning a dead language to get it. Besides, most people who learned Latin and Greek as kids don’t actually read original texts as adults, and

2. Most of the ancient philosophers were… well, let’s just say, not very good. Philosophical thought has improved over the centuries and millennia. That’s not to say that modern philosophers are all good either. Every age has a small minority of clear thinkers and a large majority of charlatans. But I’d much rather read Rothbard than Plato. There seems to be a certain worship of Ancient Greeks that seems to entirely miss the fact that their society had slaves and enshrined homosexuality and pedophilia. Sure, they also built awesome things and were very advanced for their time, but most classical education seems to skip right over the unsavory parts.

You could say that learning Latin and Greek builds discipline, but so does any difficult task. Learning French builds discipline. Building a house builds discipline. Gardening builds discipline.

Moreover, there’s vastly more to learn now than there was two centuries ago. Physics, biology, and chemistry are deeper rabbit holes than ever before. Engineering, mathematics, computer science. What about history? You could spend your entire life learning about history (and there’s a lot of lessons here that are useful to us today) and still only learn a tiny fraction. The amount we’ve learned about horticulture in just the last few decades could fill an entire library.

A serious educator in 2026 would look at the vastly expanded sum of human knowledge and have to make serious prioritization decisions on what could benefit the next generation today, and I truly struggle to see how Latin and Greek would make that cut.

And we should stop worshipping the past just for the sake of it. Yes, people 200 years ago were doing a lot of things right. They were homesteading, homeschooling, and living in intact families and communities. So we look at their education and we think, “Oh, they studied Greek and Latin, that must be why their society was good at these things,” and then we try to emulate it. But they were also doing a lot of things wrong, and correlation is not equal to causation.

This kind of past-worship is just as toxic of a mindset as the modern progressive attitude that everything in the past was bad.

They’re both wrong.

It turns out, you need to actually develop criteria and apply your own filter. And developing that ability to reason and judge for yourself is a far more important skill for your kids to learn than learning Greek or Latin.

P.S. The modern government education system sucks, and it sucks for a reason - they want you stupid and compliant - and that’s why parents should be homeschooling, but the “classical” education is not necessarily the answer.

As parents with kids, this is something we’re in the process of figuring out ourselves. I intend to share what we learn here. Hopefully this series on homeschooling & education will be valuable to others.