The net is flooded with sloppy thinking and bad ethics.
Who can you say is an exemplary person? A noble person? A person worth admiring not because he will sell you something, but because he will keep you motivated to be a good person yourself?
The modern world has lowered the bar for what humanity as a whole can achieve.
The Internet allowed us to connect and share ideas. It gave us instant communication. Endless collaboration, and access to the world's knowledge. And what do we choose to do with this power?
We watch three-second clips of cats rolling over carpets. We jump from influencer rants to clickbait headlines faster than our brains can register what we've seen. We consume "expert" advice on selling and marketing so we can capture more attention by we, ourselves, creating meaningless short-form videos.
It's sickening.
Today, we rarely speak of great men and women as models of excellence or paragons of character.
Sure, we know about the so-called famous people preaching well-being, productivity, and excellence. But their integrity collapses the moment they use the same enthusiastic tone they've just used to inspire us, to now announce their weekly sponsor or upsell us for their flagship course.
Ethics nowadays are brushed aside in favor of exposure and money-making. No one cares about you as an individual. People pretend to care only to persuade you to get what they are selling. And this tends to be contagious. We become more self-centered and careless because everybody around is trying to save themselves, not genuinely offer help for those who actively need it.
Worth reflecting on:
How can you reclaim depth and ethics in a culture that rewards brevity and virality?
The rise of shallow, meaningless content has flooded the digital realm for one main reason: we want fast results.
We genuinely believe we can life-hack our way to excellence by overconsuming tips from wannabe prophets.
Of course, this never works. To gain results from the advice we absorb. To be moved by the ideas we consume, we need to overcome the deep-rooted resistance of inertia, fear of being wrong, or straying away from the crowd.
But we also need to stop rewarding the shallow advice constantly poured over our heads.
I think that we need to shift our focus. Because each time we click on empty content due to being quick or catchy, we reinforce a system that deprioritizes wisdom, nuance, and authenticity. We reinforce a loop that rewards the least meaningful behavior with the most visibility.
Breaking out requires conscious resistance: supporting creators who value substance, slowing down our scroll, and choosing learning over loudness. Because the truth is, virality isn't a measure of value. And if we keep feeding the trap, we become the architects of our own intellectual poverty.
Worth reading:
I Realized Why You Will Never Quit Social Media: "Do we even have to talk about quitting social media? What, are we children? Children who haven’t yet developed the mental faculties to make rational decisions on their own. We should!"
Worth thinking about:
"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one."
― Charles MacKay
Thanks for reading!
