I'm looking at these images of mostly old, retired people wasting one of their last Fourth of July's on this planet by protesting against a bill that's already been passed and signed. My first thought is this has to be the biggest collective waste of time I've ever seen.
Then I looked at my Facebook (yes, a big collective waste of time in and of itself, but I'll get to that later) and there's a friend of mine who is driving from San Diego to Iowa to go to his probably thousandth Trump rally. I've been to a couple big political rallies and they can be fun, there's a certain energy to them. But driving across the country on a regular basis to hear Trump say the same thing over and over and over and over...? What a waste of human potential.
And lest you think that guy is some kook, he was a delegate at the last Republican National Convention and is considered an "influencer" (another hierarchal structure that does nothing but waste time).
What possesses people to get into these obsessive time-wasting patterns? One can say "the metastasizing of hyper partisanship," and there's truth to this - it's evolved from an interest to an obsession and now full-blown untreated mental illness on a massive scale. We have millions of people - not a majority, but it's a lot - who have become so obsessed with American partisanship that it's taken over their lives.
And what does this mind virus call them to do? Waste time in the most elaborate, expensive and socially insufferable ways possible. Millions of people have transformed from decent people going about their lives into full-time societal pains in the ass.
We saw this in the Sixties when millions of people protested a pointless, destructive war with pointless, destructive protests. The difference is these protesters were mostly young and grew up. You expect young people to waste time. You don't expect elderly people with little time left to waste it on MAGA rallies and "No Kings" (who came up with that stupid name?) protests.
Part of it is political genius. Trump saw a large swath of society that was unproductive, mentally unstable, socially disconnected and generally frustrated with life and gave them a home. He gave them rallies where they could feel connected. He gave them a leader, a banner, a slogan, a brand and they found a way to create a vast online social hierarchy that funneled money to the loudest and most obnoxious members.
There's no other place outside of this weird socially-inverted bubble where flat-out lunatics like Roger Stone and Laura Loomer could find a comfortable home. And they're not lunatics because of their policies, but because of their behavior and mindset. (Dreaming of a Trump Monarchy is not normal, and if that's all you can talk about in normal conversation, yes, that's a form of psychosis.)
There's a reason why a lot of conservatives are either skeptical or downright hostile toward "MAGA." Because unlike the MAGA zeitgeist, they have productive lives outside of that matrix. I wonder what all these people are going to do after Trump's term ends and the party's over. This isn't a sustainable model and nothing has been done to treat the underlying mental conditions.
Then the Democrats got in on the act, capitalizing on the obvious reaction among the equally large number of borderline-or-full-on-psychotic people on the left. "Trump Derangement Syndrome" didn't happen in a vacuum. It happened because crazy people resonate with other crazy people, even if they disagree with them. Crazy leftists wanted their "anti-MAGA cult" for the same underlying reasons MAGA Cult became so big.
It's only in this context that protesters blocking roads and regularly rioting makes any sense at all. Because that behavior is violent psychosis.
But we see a lot of this outside of the political arena - people going crazy on airline flights, Waffle House brawls, street shutdowns. The whole "Trans movement" is mass psychosis whose infection has spread all the way to political leadership. Examples are all over the place. The way many are acting you'd think we were in the middle of a famine, but life is pretty good here.
So what's the problem? Why is a mental condition that historically affects less than 1% of the population expanding so widely and aggressively?
If you step back, the only logical reason for why psychosis has gone from the margin to the mainstream (close to or around 10% of the population, maybe even more) is that something fundamentally changed in the way society operates.
It all comes back to the personal device and social media.
There are numerous studies linking social media to mental health issues. But these studies only hit the tip of the iceberg. The larger issues involve genuine social disconnect, boredom, increased time indoors, and dopamine addiction/ chronic depletion. (For this last one, the prevalence of caffeine addiction should also be addressed. Starbucks shares part of the blame for this.)
Add in the prevalence of porn in all its forms, available within seconds. The damage from these dopamine overloads is intense.
I can feel it in myself. Too much time on the phone/ social media changes me. I'm "not myself." It's a drug.
Add to this the legalization of marijuana, whose contribution to the mass psychosis cannot be understated as it's normalized the drug for millions of people.
Whole industries now rely on a steady flow of mentally unstable people for their existence. It's even infected the "spiritual communities." A healthy society shouldn't need many healers. One per thousand, or even ten thousand, is plenty in a healthy society. The body is a self-healing mechanism and so is the mind. Unless they're unnaturally strained or traumatized.
And yet you can find ENDLESS pages of healers - sexual healers, energetic healers, faith healers, self-proclaimed shamans, and on and on. These people should be the writing on the frosting of the cake of society, but they've become part of the main course. The insanity becomes a self-feeding cancer with the "healers" actually contributing to the illness. (Notice their practices are all embedded in social media - you can't find the cure without ingesting the poison. Their cure is literally at the bottom of a bottle.)
And that's to say nothing of the endless, insufferable political circle-jerk in places like Twitter (and those even dumber offshoots like Blue Sky).
Our bodies and mind were not equipped to handle the constant bombardment of radiation and stimulus. We've gotten to the point where putting away the phone and watching a movie on TV is actually unwinding the brain.
So what's the solution? As they say "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king," and in the land of the crazy, the slightly-abnormal person is king. Whatever "faults" you think you have are nothing in comparison to the collective insanity brought on by mobile devices and social media.
It really is as simple - and challenging - as disconnecting from your mobile device.
"Throw out your phone" might be a little extreme. (Maybe not - if you can do it, more power to you.) Severely limiting screen time - use the device for things like high-energy music and images. Get off social media platforms, or limit the use to only things that uplift your energy. I can see where keeping connections with family and friends could be useful, but that is, what, 10 minutes a day, tops? Stop following the "24-hours news" cycles, stop constantly and obsessively following the market (your strategy should be much more long-term).
Revisit your dependance on social media. Is it truly serving you or are you a slave to it? Can you stay on purpose or do you get distracted into stupid things? I know for me it's difficult to speak my truth on social media without getting sidetracked into partisan arguments that benefit nobody and leave me corrupted and drained. But on the other hand I do find really useful information here, too. And it's an important tool for self-expression, so long as I don't get caught up on view counts and other validation forms. So it's about being proactive.
And it's being proactive with your entertainment. Is this something you truly enjoy or just "killing time?" When you disengage, boredom will be the first thing to fill the gap. Develop a positive strategy for combatting this. Meditation isn't for everyone. There's exercise, outdoor hobbies, reading books (they still make them, believe it or not), face-to-face social activities. Even just going to a park or beach and sitting and feeling bored there is an improvement.
For dopamine depletion, I recommend a regimen similar to caffeine withdrawal (and I'd recommend getting off the caffeine for a while, too, as it all adds up). Basically large amounts of DLPA, cycling off through a week, followed by another week of abstinence (no caffeine, very limited screen time).
It's a process for me and I'm still working through it. But it's very rewarding. My personal yardstick is "am I closer or farther away from the time-wasting energies I can't stand?" That's a pretty good barometer. Because asking someone to shoot me if I drive halfway across the country to go to a MAGA rally is a really big imposition, not to mention a waste of a perfectly good bullet.
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