Manipulation weakens the mind. It's how it works. You have to destroy a little bit of a person's worldview so you can replace it with something else. The more you do it the easier it gets because you are removing those barriers.
When I speak with people I see a lot of what looks like a lot of what you'll see with people who've been in manipulative relationships, or cults. They don't think about things very deeply, and their logic is very scattered. More so than what a normal person's should. It's been a growing problem for nearly 20 years. It just gets worse every year. Covid definitely had an impact though whether social or medical.
Well I look at it this way. I've had to reinforce myself to a world filled with ridiculous ads trying to get me to buy shit. And this advertising culture has more and more infested every space and is present ALL of the time now. That level of vigilance was the beginning of me "just not paying attention to most shit". I mean, if ads are thrown in my face over and over and my best response is to ignore them and not feed into them, then I'm teaching my own brain to ignore information because there's lots of bullshit that's just trying to manipulate me into buying things I don't want/need. Then we get to social media which is full of rage bait, misinformation, scams, and all kinds of other stupid shit that's designed to operate like the modern day equivalent of the coliseums of medieval times. Distractions.
So basically, my brain is further taught to skim as much shit as possible because there's EVEN MORE shit I need to ignore most of the time. It's a pattern recognition thing. And so now I'm so trained to avoid bullshit (for my own health and safety) that I can't reasonably learn things or focus well enough to remember things in any meaningful, long term capacity. I CAN still learn, but it takes an extreme amount of effort more than it once did (and age doesn't help with this either, probably).
But anyways, you combine all of this together and I think what we call "a constant increase in ADHD cases" is really just the natural end result of living in a world where you can't trust anything and everything is designed to screw you or overstimulate your senses so you have to be hyper vigilant. It's an environmental and systemic sickness of the mind bred from trying to constantly adapt to countless manipulations almost 100% of the time. No one should have to be this vigilant and no one should have to constantly mistrust everything they see/hear. It's frankly ridiculous. No one has the time or energy to learn anything this way -- nor did they at ANY point in history. Never mind now where we often work more hours and stress far more than we ever had to before.
Well said! A well-tuned BS metre has always been important..now more than ever. But it is exhausting. I grew up in the 80's and couldn't stand Regan's then Dubya's bullshit, esp. when he hoaxed your country into war with Iraq. And all the advertising and religious shit...and now social media and the orange asshole. As a Canadian it was perhaps easier to see from a distance what was being done to you as a nation. You guys are truly in the middle of a shit storm!
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u/prof_the_doom 2d ago
I'm sure dumb-scrolling isn't helping, and we should probably think about ways to do something about that.
That being said, I can't help but think there's got to be more to it than just our media consumption habits.
The idea that COVID caused some sort of permanent damage is worth studying, but as the video pointed out, this started before COVID happened.
Is there a "Leaded Gasoline 2.0" out there that we should be looking for?