Do you ever wonder if you were really cut-out for this world?
In my therapy, I come across many people who think that they just “don’t fit” into their lives, or the “Modern World”
Do you feel like your life is constantly overloaded by the sheer amount of data you have to deal with?
There was some research that showed that in the mid-1960’s we used to absorb about the same amount of data as was printed in a broad-sheet newspaper per day.
Not that you would actually read a paper cover to cover each day, but that the information you received from the radio in the car, the evening news, a glance at the paper at work, and a chat to your colleagues, added up to about a paper’s worth of data..
This was then compared to the exposure to data in the 2020’s – we find that we are bombarded with sixty newspapers’ worth of data each day!!
I always make the joke with my students, imagine yourself in the seventeen hundreds, tilling your field, deep in the countryside; suddenly a riderless horse bolts down the lane beside your house. This would likely be the most exciting thing to happen to you, maybe ever!
You’d certainly dine out on that story, again and again…
These days, you’ve heard the gruesome details of a murder, about a massive factory fire, the latest horrors of an ongoing war and the crashing economy, all before you’ve got out of bed in the morning!
Our senses are constantly on overload. For some people, this is not an issue, for some people this makes life IMPOSSIBLE.
It’s clear that young people are regularly exposed to things that we would never have had access to in our youth. Pornography is a great example, it was reserved for a few magazines on the “Top shelf” of the Newsagent, and only for sale to over 18’s
Almost everything was restricted by age, smoking, driving, drinking alcohol, joining the army and voting to name a few. The idea was that children should remain children for as long as possible.
These days the maxim “sex sells” pervades everything, it’s so simple for young people to see and access sex anywhere.
We used to say that video games were making our youth more violent. I’m not certain that this is actually true, but there is an erosion that they have contributed to..
Young people just become inured to sex, violence and drug use… it’s just everywhere in popular culture and impossible to avoid.
Society is so complex to navigate these days. With virtually free access to anything a mind could imagine, people’s lives open in very unexpected ways. I think that this freedom is likely to create some exceptional people, but I think it’s just as likely to warp many minds deeply.
We build personas with which to navigate our lives, gamer, romeo, intellectual or sports fan etc..
We use these different masks that we have created to interact with different tribes.
What happens when we find it difficult to build masks, or if we find it hard to find a tribe or worse than that, fall in with a “bad” tribe with twisted ideas?
It’s never been different, there’s always been a “bad” path that any young person growing up could find their way to – it just that is so easy these days, one doesn’t even need to leave one’s bedroom to fall in with a bad lot!
There’s a further problem her that I’d like to raise.
It’s the problem of Pleasure being confused with Happiness
The background to Pleasure is the hormone Dopamine, the underscoring for Happiness is Serotonin.
Happiness is not something we can be “given” – it’s something that we can only make inside ourselves.
Pleasure is something quite different, external events can generate the Dopamine response in our bodies. The Mad Men, of Madison Avenue’s advertising businesses know this.
They know that it’s possible to trigger these experiences in our minds.
We are asked to experience how it would feel to be in the latest car, driving in the Italian alps, with a beautiful dusky maiden in the passenger’s seat looking on adoringly…
We see the image, and suddenly the dopamine centres fire in our brain…
The issue is that when you ride a roller coaster, you get a dopamine hit, it makes you want to do it again and again. This is the base of addiction.
The issue being that the more thrills we seek, the more we burn out our receptors, suddenly we need to do more and more dramatic things to get the same response from our brain.
We become thrill seekers or addicts based on this chemistry.
Our clever friends in the advertising business then try to make us think that what we are experiencing is actually HAPPINESS – but it’s NOT!
It’s only you, who can make yourself happy. External things generate pleasurable responses, Internal things make us happy, it’s really important to differentiate..
Interestingly, you’ll have no doubt have noticed the ubiquity of Salted Carmel in every sweet and cake? Food scientists discovered that this “lights up” the “pleasure” sensors in the brain like nothing else, it’s essentially “Catering Crack!”
This is a great way to sell more cakes and biscuits, and poor us, we have no idea that we are being pushed the equivalent of hard street drugs!
So many things in Society then, are sold to us, using psychological techniques that our stone-age brains have no way to defend against.
Society itself is becoming much more permissive and hostile to us..
What hope do we have!?
In Chinese Medicine one of the major filters is Yin and Yang.
Yin is calm and cool, Yang is vigorous and fiery. Every human on earth sits somewhere along the line between extreme Yin and extreme Yang. I guess eighty percent of us must sit in the middle, but at least ten percent must sit in a very Yang position such as warriors and business moguls.
There must also be ten percent of the population who sit at the extreme Yin end of the scale.
This would see you as not having a great deal of emotional and mental strength, life would always seem to be overwhelming. It’s certainly curious for somebody of my age, to look at the twenty-somethings and wonder at their seeming lack of resilience. (It’s a broad lazy brush-stroke – I know some amazingly resilient young people …)
I saw one comedian joking “I hope there’s not a trench warfare in World War Three, all they’ll have to do is bomb us with peanuts and full fat milk, it’ll all be over really soon!”
I think the reality of this may lie somewhere else.
Have we molly-coddled our children too much, given them all the things we never had?
Has science “diagnosed” more gradients of what we used to call “eccentricity” so that they can sell new types of drugs?
Has the onslaught of chemicals in all our food, washing products, clothes, water and bathroom products over-loaded some people’s bodily systems to the case where they just become ill?
Has the onslaught of work and emotional stress finally become too much for some people to bear?
Has the dissolving of religion and it’s being replaced by many different fadish “god” finally helped people to loose their place?
Has the casual break-up of family finally unrooted people’s minds?
Yes, yes and yes..
Most of the people in the centre of my Yin to Yang scale can just about cope (until their late 50’s) before they start getting really sick.
There are however many, who are burning out in their 20’s and 30’s.
There’s an interesting little bit of “conspiracy theory” about the nature of our world breaking apart.
It talks about the rise of AI, of microchips in our bodies and the constant monitoring and controlling of our lives.
The World Economic Forum and Klaus Shwab are pointed at here as being the authors of this new way of controlling humanity on a world scale..
The idea is that it doesn’t really matter if you support the Left or the Right, homosexuality or deep Christianity, black rights or the KKK, vaxers or non—vaxers…
None of it’s important to them.
All they are working towards is to destabilise EVERYBODY in some way.
To set everybody against everybody else!
The more families they can divide the better. (Up until the Pandemic, the family was the last bastion of togetherness… The Pandemic managed to split even families like nothing has ever done in the past)
What would be the point?
Well, If you are living in FEAR, you’ll always be looking to the “higher-ups” for the solution. You are driven by your fear (of what, it doesn’t matter) right into the arms of the waiting shadowy rulers… You’ll accept a chip in your arm, border controls to keep the “others” out, GMO food, any drugs they say you need… and so it goes..
Just in case you’ve missed the UBER point, it’s a great way for “them” to become super rich too!
Is it our fate to become the soft moving parts in the AI machine?
In an unexpected twist, do we REALLY end up become the batteries of The Matrix, just as the movie suggested!!!
So there it is.
We are faced with a future that ONLY promises complexity.
We are hurtling away from a simple life.
The ONLY cure I know of for Hyper-sensitive People is SILENCE.
These people who “had a try” at life, but just can’t hack it, the people who have burned out trying to compete with the “normals” – the only thing they can do is to spend time on their own, or in small groups of loving caring people.
This is why I need help starting a retreat centre…
It has to be a quiet and beautiful place (there’s nothing that heals quite as well as Nature)
There’ll be good food, lots of exercise, Meditation, Qigong and Positivity – bucket-loads of Positivity..
I’ve seen some great places in Portugal, but I need backers.
I even have a good business plan for them too!
Build a property portfolio with your millions, receive a decent rent from the retreat centres, get free retreats as part of your investment and HELP OTHER PEOPLE, whilst your property investment goes UP and UP.
I’d start with Europe, then South America, and then the Far East.
It’s an International Property and Health Fund!
Tell your rich friends!!
Hao La!
(Everything is good already…)