Engaging online with today’s world will fry your brain, attack your nervous system, and will make you doubt whether humanity has lost its common sense.
It also will
Feed you contradictory information to confuse you
Trick you into believing hyper objects are real
Forces you to take sides to feel safe in an in group
Feed you constantly with headlines and images that traumatize you
Pull you into a dialogue on Social Media that is based on hate and polarization, leaving you with anger and even more separation anxiety
Feed you accelerating scientific discoveries that pretend Humanity is close to solving all problems, we just need that one extra breakthrough
Avoid truth at all cost
The above are all part of what thought leader Daniel Schmachtenberger calls the poisoned information ecology.
The solution is not switching off completely living in a shack in the mountains as a monk. One day you’ll wake up and find drones hanging above your head. As envisioned in Dave Eggers’, The Circle.
Since we’re sense-making monkeys, it's impossible to completely disconnect from the worlds information channels. We need info-bytes to make decisions to eventually survive.
This is how you can live a happy, simple and modest life while knowing exactly what is going on in the world.
Feel the soil, feed your soul
The most important cure for the information virus is connection with the earth. Land. Nature.
The very thing everything Big Tech tries to disconnect us from.
It’s one of the solutions my other favourite thought-leader Jamie Wheal mentions in this podcast.
Find a spot in nature and sanctify it.
Go there every week, for at least a few hours. Do your rituals. You can do this living in a city. When you’re lucky enough to find yourself living on land, or a community taking care of the land, you will soon find yourself living in heaven.
At least, that’s what I’m experiencing lately. We are seeding new plants and veggies at the moment in our communal garden. I never did this in my life.
It’s sublime bliss of another level.
Growing food is grounding. It's energetically nurturing. it makes you feel part of the infinite cycle of life.
Seeding and harvesting is healing the huge disconnect our cultural story of separation with nature forced us to believe.
Manifest your piece of land on this planet and give it all you got
Living on land and feeding it was a clear and strong intention for me in 2022, with others, creating something new.
You can manifest this too. Get your piece of the earth, your homestead, your piece of a city farm, sanctify the plants on your balcony. Whatever it takes.
Join this magical humbling experience where you will feel whole. Part of this magic cycle of life is to realize you are that exact same seed of grain that rises, flourishes, blooms and dies.
And returns to the sacred land to be reborn.
Take in doses of the info-virus you can handle
I’ve been writing a sore thumb for most of 2020 and 2021, catching up with this insane rally of events during the introduction of the so-called new normal.
Really, my laptop misses two letters, they’ve been lost in translating the insane madness out there. Partly to make sense of the world for myself, partly to share information, partly to give wisdom and life lessons. And all of that combined.
At the end of 2021, I got the flu (a virus update), and this taught me to disconnect more with this smelly daily information sewer spread over humanity. It’s increasingly full of lies, deceit, propaganda and shameless corporate weaponization of information. It’s fair to say this is the real virus.
My solution? Take in doses of the info-virus you can handle and get aware of when you take in too much.
The signs you took in too much info poison
These are the signs for when you took in too much;
Your focus is gone and it takes time to refocus on one clear task
You are angry about a framed group of people and from a strong sense of being right, you'd love to throw these selfish ‘others’ and ‘non-humans’ from the planet. How dare they challenge your worldview.
You just strolled one hour of Instagram reels against your intention. You just got cleverly hijacked.
You are emotionally engaged with a subject that is not even in your reality. For example; Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, or something as big as ‘Climate Change’
Train yourself to recognize the above symptoms and stay present when your attention gets hijacked. Set limits on your online presence by being aware it's a snake pit.
Let’s dive a little deeper into this concept of Hyper Objects. They carry another part of the solution for living a more healthy and meaningful life.
Escape hyper objects by realizing they’re not real
With the rise of the Internet, we have slowly gone from real-life experiences, real sensical sensations of engaging with the world, to a process of slow abstraction. Our brains have changed in the process.
Our imagination is humanities greatest gift and its biggest curse.
A brand like Coca Cola, Renault, or Tesla have a place in our collective consciousness. They’ve become alive entities. We keep them alive with our imagination, granting them the status of so-called hyper objects.
Social Media and marketing have connected most of these hyper objects to emotions. When you read Climate change. What do you feel?
Fear for more disasters? Anxiety for burning forests? Grief for species extinction? Anger for Governments not taking action? In reality, Climate always changes. We would be really f****d when the climate would decide to stop changing one day.
Hyper objects take us away from our direct reality. Social media has become so strong that it is replacing our own reality with another universe full of hyper objects that we have learned to recognize over the past years.
We are now in the dangerous threshold of a whole new young generation being screen-educated into believing hyper objects are more real than the world around them. They’re not. They’re an illusion.
Learn to disconnect from these hyper objects for living a happier life.
How to make sense in narrative warfare that seems to increase the intensity
The amount of info poison you can handle depends on the level of your immunity to information warfare.
This in turn is connected to the level of being awake of what is propaganda and part of narrative warfare, and what is actually closer to the truth. Something philosophers call discerning noise from signal.
The contradiction here is that you need a lot of information to take in these days to make sense of what’s going on, and at the same time, this information is poisoning you.
Happily, I took in as much as I could in 2020 and 2021, for my survival and the ones around me, and this made it possible to create a foundation of sensemaking in this world that’s going Bananas.
When you do the same, you’ll reach a level where the information outside is just more of the same, in an increasing scale of insanity. Like we’re experiencing with the heart attack warnings last week in the U.K
This is the moment to disconnect, go within, go to your garden, simply be happy and feel connected with the world directly around you.
You are not to blame for this mess.
Eco-Tribalism
I gave a quick peek into today’s poisoned information ecology and how almost any topic gets weaponized and used against innocent consumers to hook them, hijack their attention and feed them polarization and trauma.
How to survive in this Twitter, Facebook, MSM storm of hate and not drown in a sea of dopamine offered by Instagram and TikTok?
Not to speak of being ambushed by hyper objects like Covid, Climate Change and Billionaires that keep you from looking at your own tangible reality out there at arm's length. A beautiful world wherein simplicity bliss can be found at almost any moment.
Take in just enough of the virus of today’s ‘news’, raise your immunity to the lies and propaganda, and make your own sense in a world where almost all of the old institutions are about to implode.
They won’t go silent into the night. Mainstream Media will try to take down as many victims as possible, YouTube personalities like Joe Rogan that grew bigger than CNN. This is their death struggle, not Joe’s. The last convulsions of systems that underestimated our capability for our own truth-finding.
Meanwhile, keep your screens at a healthy distance and practice Eco-tribalism. Grow a garden, be blissfully happy in natural nurture. Share your harvest. Celebrate life with peers.
Let go of the old, embrace the new.
Claim your birthright to be a happy thriving human being and be an example for others that still live in the dark ages of this decades-long perception management game that’s about to disappear in a black hole of history when too many have woken up from the lies.
Because it simply isn’t serving our next evolutionary step.
Lucien Lecarme
Secrets for Living a Meaningful Life in a World that's Going Bananas