If you are not already a student of technology, business, psychology, and spirituality, then go watch The Social Dilemma on Netflix, and keep reading this post.
The movie will put into focus how dangerous social media is, and the effects that it can have on our well being if we are not properly trained and prepared to counter its attacks. These attacks come at us all day and night, with constant notifications and sounds that draw our attention to our shiny screens. Each time the bell goes off, like Pavlov's dog, we mentally salivate for the forthcoming information and accompanying dopamine rush. Indeed, by constantly summoning our attention and focus with information, social media does not merely entertain; rather, it takes over our internal worlds and constructs our internal realities, which to each of us looks and feels indistinguishable from reality itself.
And the results are consistently, and manifestly bad; this is not to say that there aren't positive elements of social media and of information sharing more broadly, but to warn against a particular type of mental trap we are all prone to getting caught in.
Here's the first trap--see if it sounds familiar: Over the last number of years, people that have known me and loved me for my entire life suddenly think I'm crazy, or evil, or politically polarized. In real life, no one has ever thought of me as anything other than loving, level headed, extremely logical, and sensible. But online, it's a whole different story.
And people seem quite crazy to me as well, but for a different reason. When I'm online, I see loving, caring, warm people that I love deeply spending massive, and ever increasing amounts of their time concerned about the world. COVID hasn't helped. Each day, my Facebook feed is filled with friends posting articles that pique and spike their emotions to unhealthy levels. Many seem to be existing in a constant state of sanctimonious rage, seeing evil in others everywhere, and never in themselves, thus compelling them to spread their warnings against whatever the existential threat du jour may be.
This evil they find seems to exist nearly everywhere except, notably, in their actual realities. Their friends are good. Their neighbors are good. Their families are good. Even the people they know that they don't especially like or agree with are not that bad. But in the virtual reality of the internet, their focus is inexorably drawn to a perverse and pervasive evil that needles their minds and stokes strong emotions, and often times, rage.
We all see things from a perspective that is unique, forged out of our innate differences and life experiences. For me, as a magician since the age of 12 and a philosophy of mind and political science student at Tufts University, I have spent my life endeavoring to understand how the mind works to construct internal realities, which are themselves illusions. Philosophy asks the question of how things work, and magic takes those discoveries and puts them into practice and application, allowing magicians to deliberately construct specific illusions in the minds of others. The two pursuits dovetail nicely together, and form the foundation of how I see the world. Sharing this information is often received with resistance, because as my former professor Daniel Dennet quipped in one of this TED Talks, everyone thinks they are an expert on consciousness because each of us has our own personal experience with it. However, this first hand knowledge of our own consciousness does not make us experts in how it works. Rather, it makes us opinionated. Regardless, here are some of the lessons of the mind needed to adequately cope with modern life.
Lesson One: We See What We Focus On.
There is far too much data at any given moment in time to perceive all that is going on, so our brains develop tricks, habits, and shortcuts in order to derive a digestible and small enough version of reality to work with and function.
Magicians use this limited conscious capacity to curate the perception of reality by highlighting the moments they want seen, and editing or camouflaging those that they don’t want seen. This is classically referred to as misdirection.
But is it really misdirection, or is it direction, or simply, focus? More of the time, magicians create the illusion of magic by directing attention to the story they want perceived. In so doing, the method is inherently concealed, masked behind the bottleneck of consciousness.
As we hone this craft of magic, the philosophical among us eventually realize that this illusion of reality, created by focus, is not only true for our audiences, but for ourselves as well, and at all times. Meaning, our own realities are shaped by our focus, most of which is not deliberately chosen, but habitually formed without conscious, intentional, or benevolent curation. We believe in our own realities, without questioning what reality would look like if only our focus aimed elsewhere.
Here's an illustration:
When you look at the word "Brainstorm" your mind hears that word through the noise. And yet, with the identical audio track, if we focus on the words "Green Needle", we only hear that and are unable to detect the word "Brainstorm". More importantly, if you close your eyes and only listen to the audio track with no visual input at all, your mind will hear whichever word you focused on mentally.
This is an example of how our minds see and hear what we focus on. But we also see and hear things according to our priming. A classic example of this is the McGurk effect:
In this example, we expect to hear either "bah" or "fah", depending upon the visual clue we get from reading his lips. In fact, the sound is "bah" in both cases, but our minds trick us into hearing "fah" because that's what we'd expect to hear based on this lip movements.
Why do these demonstrations matter in a discussion of the dangers of social media? Because they show the power of our focus. Our focus is our reality, not in some magical way, but in a way that shows us that magic and reality are the same thing.
During a period such as now, when each of us has time on our hands to reflect, consider your habits, and inputs, and actions, and decide with care whether they are serving you. If the only thing your habits do is galvanize thought that doesn’t lead to action, or worse, makes you fearful, or spiteful, or sanctimonious, or angry, or enraged, or nihilistic, then are your thoughts, habits, and inputs really serving you? Will you look back at your life and be content knowing you spent so much of it thinking about subjects chosen for you by media and computer algorithms that don’t care about your well being at all? Or, would you have been better off choosing a focus for yourself, one that makes you feel good about yourself and helps you to overcome the ennui of existence.
Get started. The internet is overwhelmingly fake and increasingly populated by bots. They are programmed to keep us discontented.
Watch “the social dilemma”, right away. It puts into vivid relief how these technologies work, and why. My hope in writing this is to explain a bit about how you work, and how to use that information to beat the machines, and improve yourself in the ways only you can envision.
Understanding our own minds as the portal to our hearts gives us an opportunity to defend ourselves from the machines. It is not science fiction or something we need to worry about in the future, like the prescient possibility of fighting off terminators. This problem is now, and in truth, it has always been, something our more spiritual ancestors well understood.
No one will take care of your mental health for you. If you find yourself spending a lot of time reading and posting articles that upset you, or mistrusting the people you love the most, understand that that is their design. Ask yourself if you were designed, or created, or otherwise meant to suffer? If you believe that you were not, then see if you can find an alternate, positive explanation of reality, one that does not negate empirical facts, but that has a more uplifting theme. Curate your own inner world. Find the good. If you don’t habituate this curation, others will do it for you, and with no regard for your well being.
Best of luck, and for those you celebrating, Shana Tova.
Michael Friedland
September 19, 2020
