Modern Media Is Making Us Degenerates

Murder, Sex, and Illusion On The Daily Makes Jack a Dull Boy

Six months ago, I was deep in an ayahuasca journey when suddenly all these particularly strange visions, ideas, and thoughts began arising from my subconscious.

Content I had consumed passively that I assumed had no impact on me was suddenly overwhelming my mind with rapid-fire images.

Street fights, stupid memes, war footage...things I had watched on Instagram, Reddit, and in the media were flashing before my eyes.

For a brief moment, it became clear how many of my thoughts, opinions, and fears were a product of what I was consuming daily.

Most of us intuitively feel this - but few of us do anything about it.

We shrug our shoulders and accept that this is the reality of life in this era.

But just because we've normalized it does not mean it's normal.

Philosopher Krishnamurti famously said, "It's no sign of health to be adjusted to a sick society."

We are so sick.

We haven't even begun to understand what this social experiment is doing to our psychology - but we are starting to see clues.

Look at the rise of dysmorphia amongst women - going to surgeons in droves, asking to look like a Snapchat filter, resulting in this trend of ridiculous cartoon-looking figures.

Our brain was not meant to be exposed to the level of constant sexualization, violence, and information modern media offers.

Yet we are magnetized to it.

Watching violence or sex puts us in an excitatory state.

When we do that over and over again, these systems become overwhelmed and down-regulated.

Now, watching someone having a grenade dropped on them from a drone and blowing up doesn't mean anything.

This is a slippery slope, because when extreme events that we would normally see once or twice in our life become pieces of content we consume for hours every day, it fundamentally changes our perception of reality.

I'm not going to make the jump that listening to violent music is going to turn you into a murderer...

But it would be naive to think pounding your brain with ideas that normalize and even celebrate killing other humans has no effect.

Any rationalization otherwise just shows how disconnected from reality we are - and the extent we have to numb ourselves to be with modern life.

Last week I spent five days at a primitive skills gathering in South Carolina.

It's one of the weird, dorky passions of mine - going to gatherings to learn how to make friction fires, tan hides, and pass down the ancient ways of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

These mock-ancient villages feel more real than anything in our modern world.

Walking around outside all day in my bare feet, connecting with people face-to-face while learning how to craft things with my own hands.

Sitting around the fire at night listening to stories about our more-than-human world, watching musicians play traditional tunes while children run around wild (like they're supposed to).

Not a single screen in sight.

Our last night sitting around the fire I was brought to grief, my eyes welling up with tears.

I was listening to an elder tell enchanting stories about how the skin of a Brook Trout looks like the scribbles of an ancient language and felt a surge of emotions.

It was the first time in a long time I had felt whole.

In that moment, away from the synthetic everything, I was reacquainted with something real.

Real community.

Real connection.

Real...life.

Nothing we consume on a screen, no matter how engaging, informative, or entertaining, can replace the real world.

The smell of the poplar bud.

The song of the lark at sunrise.

The feeling of the morning sun on your skin and dewy grass under your feet.

As we head towards an increasingly digitized, augmented reality, the yearning for something real in my heart grows larger every day.

And yet, I find myself numbing this pain with the very thing that is driving the wedge between the real and the manufactured.

Tapping away at pixels behind a piece of glass.

Lighting up my brain with flashing colors like a slot machine.

Losing my sense of self, time, and reality because being with the pain of disconnection is too much.

Taking it all into my subconscious, where my ancient hardware can't distinguish the false from the truth, reality from illusion, and allowing that to influence who and how I be in the world.

Perpetuating the cycle that goes on and on.

We are victims to a hyper-synthetic, hyper-capitalized world that is killing us from the inside out.

Turning us into cold, stone monsters who are disconnected from our hearts, each other, and the world-at-large.

For all of its alleged connection, the reality is modern media is destroying what it means to be human.

Of course, it's not all bad - but the idea of being the product of a mega-corporation has never sat right with me.

Giving my attention, presence, and life force to a soulless entity in exchange for empty entertainment is an exchange with the devil.

I recognize these tools are a part of many of our livelihoods (mine included), but personally my relationship needs to change if I want to have any semblance of mental health going forward.

I don't have a solution to this problem - other than to invite you into being absolutely judicious with what, when, and how you consume information in this day and age.

And that the majority of your day is spent doing real things, with real people, who you can touch, interact with, and share a breath with in real time.

As the world becomes increasingly shallow, unreal, and disembodied, I am consciously moving towards Depth.

I hope you'll join me.