What we allow into our minds, and how and why.
I’m just going to come out and say it – I feel the former (learning) is being replaced by the latter (consuming), and with possibly dangerous effects. I think it’s no surprise that generally we’re doing more of the latter and less of the former. I also feel there are deliberate attacks on our cognitive capabilities e.g. attention spans and the way we think. There is a growing cohort of people who don’t want to learn or who only consume. It was Socrates who said “the unexamined life is not worth life”, and I feel the opposite is equally true; the examined life is worth living…and it can only be done through learning.
“Be mindful of what you’re consuming – much like food, the wrong diet can make you ill.”
There are many ways to examine the differences between learning and consuming, but the obvious ones to me are purpose, method, results/outcomes, time period involved, and perhaps most crucially, one is a conscious effort and the other can be largely unconscious (with latent effects).
“I find that people who wish to learn want to enrich their life whereas those who mainly wish to consume want to escape their life.”
A significant amount of these two modes of being is down to prioritisation, organisation and attention. I’ve noticed a decline in the cognitive effort of the average person, and this is partially due to what I wrote about in “Overwhelmed and Exhausted”, where we are not designed to care about so many things at once, along with being bombarded from all angles and generally worked to the point where mindless consuming is all we have effort for.
It can feel a bit “chicken or the egg”, what comes first? The reduced cognitive effort or the mindless consuming or unwillingness to learn? Granted, a lot of our consuming (and even learning) takes place through an electronic device, this has led to increases in anxiety, depression and loneliness as well as cognitive and memory effects from prolonged use.
Dr Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and author – including his latest book, “The Anxious Generation”, is helping to lead the charge against the war on our youth in this digital age. The aim is to delay the ages for smartphones and social, and to have phone-free schools, amongst other things, to improve psychological and social development for young kids. Teenagers are consuming upwards of 9-10 hours a day on screens – over half of that on phones (a quarter of which is done at school) – receiving close to 250 notifications a day, small wonder this is affecting their mental and social wellbeing (over 40% of the highest social media users rate their overall mental health as poor or very poor). Clearly the consuming is winning, and the learning hath stunted.
“The media/news is there (at best) to inform, but not to educate.” [I refer you back to the differences between learning and consuming: purpose, method, results/outcomes, time period involved, level of consciousness]
The 24/7/365 news cycle has essentially turned itself into a consumable product, and is the main reason why I say that if something isn’t in the news in a week or two then it really isn’t worthy of my attention. Many alternative news sources have sprung up over the last decade, for better or worse, largely stemming from a distrust in the existing institutions and thanks significantly to technological advances, the internet and social media. As I mentioned previously, with our children’s increased screen time and access to the internet/social media, more and different news is being reached with varying effects.
People are also substituting, bypassing or replacing tech colleges/unis with YouTube and social media, partially as a result of this distrust in existing institutions I said above. In some cases this is understandable e.g. cost, availability, convenience, desire to self-educate. I’m not suggesting that all knowledge must be gatekept at these educational establishments, but there has been a noticeable uptake towards socially validated knowledge and learning as opposed to institutionally validated knowledge and learning – the vetting and status processes fundamentally differ.
Advertising fits a similar bill. Commercial/private advertising is aimed more at consumption and manipulating your behaviour to do so, whereas Governmental/public advertising is generally aimed at bringing awareness to an issue which you can further learn about and help yourself and others with. However, this erosion of trust extends to this domain also, making it difficult to sort fact from fiction.
Hopefully we’ve arrived at the point where you don’t think I’m some Asian parent who doesn’t allow their child to do anything other than learn because that’s not what I’m getting at with this article. I’m trying to convey my sense of concern at the manner of what, how and why we allow material into our minds, and associated topics. I’m trying to highlight and prevent the cognitive decline I see where people think they’re learning when in fact they’re consuming. Please consider donating at one of the links below, if you are able to do so, I would very much appreciate it.
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