Dictate Your Beliefs

 

Waking up this morning, for some reason I decided to bring up my daily newspaper on the big screen to read while putting my medicine together. What I had forgotten about was the reason I decided not to read my digital newspaper in the first place. No better than the headlines screaming across my TV on news channels were the headlines of doom and gloom. It meant that if I wanted any sliver of cited information, I was going to have to dig deep.

So I turned the app off and went back to real life, finishing a call to my urologist about a prescription.

It seems like even reputable news sources have jumped on the hype-train to catch more views and subscribers, while the forces of FB, TT, and 24-hour news all fight for our limited attention spans. It doesn’t seem that long ago when I’d see my dad or granddad at the kitchen table, their heads buried intently between the pages of the Savannah Morning News or The Evening Press respectively. Even as a kid, I’d ask for the comic strip section or read the box scores of my favorite teams on the living room floor. The point is, we took the time to search the facts and not just the opinion.

But even now I find myself drawn to the opinion and not the facts. So much so that the opinion section is usually the first place I go in the NYT. I guess the cold-hard-facts don’t hit that dopamine center of the brain quite as much as a bloody and shocking headline does, does it?

So we go about our daydreaming of a simpler time, when all along the same shit we see now happened back then. The inequality, the racism, the bigotry—all wrapped in polite little packages. Instead, now we get offended when we get called out on it. Polite society is full of compromise and give and take; you can’t have it your way all the time. Even the “plan of salvation” in the Christian Bible is a choice, not a demand.

Learn to get along and stop depending on the art of theatrics to dictate your beliefs.

 

#Wishing #GoodOldDays #Dopamine #Compromise #Choice