Show Notes
Overwhelmed With Content? Use This Method.
One simple question can get your time (and your life) back!
I deleted all my social media accounts 11 years ago, yet every day I’m overwhelmed with things to listen to. And that’s just on Spotify. There are countless fascinating podcast interviews, and more and more being uploaded every day. If you’re on social media, I can’t even begin to imagine how many choices you have. It’s beyond overwhelming!
I’m obsessed with learning, and my main interests are philosophy, theology, psychology, anthropology, and history. But, all the waking hours each day aren’t enough to listen to all the podcast episodes I’m interested in. So I prioritize, then listen at a high speed in an attempt to learn as much as humanly possible. But this is utterly exhausting. Humans are not meant to take in this much information.
And as there are still only 24 hours in the day, despite the ever-expanding universe of things to watch and listen to, I’m realizing that the more podcasts I devour, the less time I have for music. And when I say music, I don’t mean background music. I’m listening to Beethoven’s beautiful and uplifting Serenade for flute, violin and viola in D major (Opus 25) as I write this. But, I’m not actively listening. When we give music our full attention, it rewards us by changing our mind, body, and spirit.
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Just a few minutes of music can change our biochemistry, which in turn changes our mood and our outlook. Or maybe it’s the other way round? Either way, music is magic. It’s arguably the most powerful thing that most of us have access to. If they could bottle the power of music, we’d all be rushing to buy it. Yet somehow, despite the fact that most of us have free music on tap, we spend hardly any time actively listening to it each day. That’s mad. I’m mad! Are you mad, too?
Or to put it more accurately, we’ve been mind-controlled. If the masses were spending many hours actively listening to uplifting music every day, instead of scrolling on their phones, it would be extremely difficult to keep everyone fearful. And if the masses aren’t fearful, it’s pretty much impossible to control them. So they feed us fear propaganda 24/7, which we gobble up like fiends, and then waste our one precious life being scared of everything.
This isn’t a new technique. It’s as old as civilization. They’re just getting exponentially better at influencing our beliefs and behaviour - thanks to progress and technology, which we’re constantly brainwashed into believing are great advances that make us so much better off than all the hunter-gatherers around the world who live happy and healthy lives without progress and technology.
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So here’s how I’m trying to take back control of my time, and therefore, my life. Before clicking on something to watch or listen to, I’m asking myself this simple question: Is this art, or is this merely content?
You can define art however you want, but at the end of the day, art nourishes and enriches us, while content only fills us. Not many of us need more content, but all of us could do with more nourishment and enrichment. Also, I’m thinking about what type of relationship I’d have with the thing I’m considering watching or listening to. Art is a two-way relationship, because it activates our imaginations.
For example, the author Alexander McCall Smith, whose writing I love, has a new podcast called Positive Distraction. Each episode is a short story, written and read by the author. It’s a wonderful way to take a break from reality for a few minutes and withdraw into our imaginations.
Content, on the other hand, is a one-way relationship: It feeds, we eat. Gobble, gobble, gobble.
Another technique I’m trying out before watching or listening to something is asking myself this question: Will I feel better listening to one of my favourite albums instead of this thing? If the answer is