 Today, May 40, you're listening to Athenian Stranger on Alex Cachuda's podcast. To be emphasized with the embrace of the rapidity, the fast-paced society that we're living in that's only increased. That's what the whole point of social media is. It increases the rapidity with which we fly through life. Not necessarily. You get to control the rapidity with which you fly through life. I just come from Tenum Sands. People aren't flying through life in Tenum Sands. You can choose where you want to live. You can choose the speed of life that you want to lead. It's not being chosen for you by Facebook or Twitter or YouTube. You get to decide. You can join a religious community which will help you slow down. You can join a contemplative community who might help you slow down. You can get a good therapist who might help you slow down. A 12-step program might help you slow down. You can exercise on a regular basis. It might help you calm down. If you've got ADHD, get a psychiatrist, get medication, get techniques or dealing with a racing mind. Or that that gets increased without people being aware of it. We simply become less thoughtful. To me, that's obvious, is that we become less thoughtful because we immediately think, well, hold on. I'll ask my friend about this. I'll ask my friend about this right out. It's like everyone knows someone who can do it for them and it doesn't matter what the thing is. They're going to defer to them and so we all become less thoughtful because of that. Really? Are we really becoming less thoughtful because of social media or because the world is faster paced? I sense people with IQs over 120 who are pretty dug on, thoughtful. We all do what we're good at. People are good at playing basketball. People are good at thinking about abstract concepts. Think about abstract concepts. People are good at cooking, cook. People who are good at figuring out naughty philosophical or logical questions. That's what they like to do in their spare time. I think I'm reasonably good at live streaming and creating videos and discussing ideas. That's what I do here on my vacation in Australia. We're going to do what we're good at and we're going to try to avoid things that we're not good at. I recently read something, a snippet of something actually. A very quick snippet on social media. I think it was from ZeroHP and I think he was reviewing that book by The Last Psychiatrist. A sadly porn book. I don't know if this is his idea or if it's something he's taken out of the book and explaining. But the idea that essentially all of visual media is porn and especially it is porn at this point where because you're not allowing yourself or this media is not allowing you to generate your own fantasies. It's all been planted into you and in a way you're kind of living out these weird ideas Is that someone else? Look, some of the earliest times our thoughts, our fantasies, our hero systems came from our community. It still comes from our community, our extended community. But you think 45,000 years ago people weren't getting thoughts and dreams and a sense of meaning and a transcendent hero system from their community. Of course they were. There's never been a time when we're just being individuals making our own decisions, choosing and creating our own hero systems without regard to the community in which we live. Marketers, I've been recently kind of gently trying to renovate my home and actually I had some very strict ideas about what it would look like. And now in the last few days I feel like I've woken up from a dream because my home is kind of like my family home. It's kind of like a museum. Most of the stuff that my parents have collected throughout the years and you know, weirder stuff, nicer stuff, whatever. My idea was to completely got it and turn it into like whatever a restoration hardware type, you know, a place that looks, you know, like that's someone from some mommy blogger. I don't know. The girls I knew growing up would constantly rearrange their room. They're constantly nesting. It sounds like quintessential, you know, female drama. Interesting plant into my brain from sponsored deals. No, it doesn't come from sponsors. Women were doing that before there was TV, before there was radio, before there were newspapers. Women are constantly adjusting the nest. This isn't just some alien thought that was implanted in Alex Gashuta by the advertising industry. So there was a review in the New York Times recently of the trouble that monks had with distraction in the Middle Ages. Even monks in the Middle Ages, they constantly dealt with distraction. They constantly dealt with their attention being taken elsewhere from what they wanted. Their minds were racing in the Middle Ages. Monks were struggling with racing minds in the Middle Ages. This is just all part of being human. It's just not some nefarious left-wing plot. I feel like I'm bulletproof to a lot of scyops just because I've been in frog Twitter for probably almost a decade now with Jason Spaces. This taught me a lot about the strange pornographic nature of everything that comes through the little square. Monks were struggling with the same thing 800 years ago. Having an advertising industry and social media, it hasn't radically transformed being human. And we did not evolve to be gullible. I don't know, we kind of wake up from that. Yeah, so she had some obsessions that were not in her best interest. And that comes from our biology. It comes from hormones. It comes from getting a dopamine rush. You still struggle with these same things even if you weren't watching TV. There's something to this. There's more dopamine rushes easily available to us. But I think they're overstating their case.