We are constantly bombarded with an incomprehensible stream of information. Media of all forms appears to be the greatest source of noise after human interaction itself. Let’s talk a little about applying a filter to our lives to remove the noise and leave us with a clear signal that we can work with.
Of the immediately observable media, one of the most noisy is politics. From Dale Carnegie’s “How to win friends and influence people.” We can get basic ideas, most of which we already know, of where people derive a sense of importance. Observing the journey of my generation and the one just behind us, I notice strong ties to coming of age to vote and prioritization and allocation of resources towards things political.
Overcoming feelings of civic duty and political obligation: Social conditioning and our desire to matter often cause us to allocate a disproportional amount of mental capacity and material resources to many things that are trivial in our day to day lives. Politics, as it exists in the contemporary United States, is an incomprehensible machine that is so large it is truly impossible to create any kind of relationship between input & output. We are told a great deal of things matter, and on a theoretical level they do. Do our actions influence them and on what level? I’ve have yet to meet someone that can trace the link to their input and the desired results when dealing with the political realm.
Why I don’t participate in anything political: Allocating attention and resources to things that directly impact your day to day life is a much better use. Developing the skill set to exist and prosper in any environment is very beneficial. Beating the system with the current rules in place is much easier and more rewarding when compared to attempting to change the rules to be more conducive to your success or align more closely with your personal beliefs. The constant influx of media combined with our desire to understand everything gives way to backwards rationalization and post explaining things that we really don’t know why or how they happen. The most accurate term that I have found to describe this phenomenon is “the narrative fallacy.” In short, I’m hesitant to say that any time spent on thing political is a waste… but I am quite confident my time and resources are best utilized elsewhere. Where can I trace in my life can I trace the link from input and output?
“The low information diet,” as described by Tim Ferris, is critical to silencing the noise so that you can acquire focus and clarity. One of my favorite illustrations of this idea can be found in books by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan). His character Fat Tony is often more apt to make decisions because he understands that he doesn’t understand. He makes the realization that on these grand scale “issues” you can’t trace the link between our percieved inputs and outputs. In a Brooklyn accent, “It’s not the same ting.” The excess of information that we can’t use and don’t need makes us far less able to make clear decisions with good judgement.