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.
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:
Who put out this information?
Why did they put out this information? What is their purpose?
How did I feel before and after reading this information?
Is the information well sourced and factually provable or is it a bunch of conjecture?
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.
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.
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.
