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Thoughts about conscious consumption

You probably heard the phrase “we are what we eat” a number of times during your life. Skipping all the nutrition facts and details of the process we can get to obvious agreement upon the meaning behind that phrase.

I’m glad that more people these days are trying to be conscious with what they eat and how they live in general. Even such things as meditation and “mindfulness” are pretty common now.

I’ll probably share some of my thoughts and personal experience later in the series, but generally I believe that being mindful it’s an important aspect of life.

What I’d like to talk about today is “content hygiene”, especially in what news you read, what content you watch and what emotions you feel when you do it. because I believe that we are what we feel.

Back in a day I came across this quote:

It made me think about why in the age of unlimited access to the any kind of information, when you can read any book and educate without leaving your apartment, people still prefer to read, react and spread that negative or useless content.

The answer is simple — demand creates supply. And people are just not aware of the importance of making conscious choices.

Remember your childhood? How many toys you had? What was you first cellphone? How many times during the day you heard the latest hit on the radio?

I’d like to use music as an example here, because it’s something I feel more comfortable to refer to.

Year 1971. The band called Led Zeppelin had just released their fourth album called “Led Zeppelin IV” with the song that probably played by literally every radio station countless number of times. In that same year 37 albums were released by major labels and considered as “popular”. And if you look at the “top 10” songs of that year, you will most likely recognize at least half of them. The same thing applies to all the bands and songs significant for music history and popular culture. Queen, Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Sinatra just to name a few. Why were they so big?

I’d like to keep it straight — I love and appreciate the music they did, the influence they had and still have, feelings they bring and finally their contribution to the music and culture. The same is with the way their music influenced millions of people across the globe to make their own music, so the next generations of musicians were able to express themselves through music.

So why they were so big? Taking away their talent and the fact that their music is still amazing we can clearly see that they also were the pioneers in what they did. They’ve defined the genre, the style and the taste of the audience. But also there was almost no alternative.

685 albums were released in 2019 total. How many of them will be “significant” for the music history or at least to an artist’s catalogue? How many of them will be legendary for people apart from artist’s fans? The variety of selection offered to you by radio is enormously huge compared to 50 or even 20 years ago.

The culture of consumption has also changed. Remember the cassette or CD you bought with a new album? You’ve been listening to the whole thing over and over. The way the music was recorded and distributed had limitations in capacity, but still some artists were able to use it in their favour and made some masterpieces like “The Wall” by Pink Floyd, where each song follows another and complements the whole picture. Some of thematic albums were like books, with a plot you can hear through all the songs. But what if you want to hear this particular song out of context? Or what if your favourite band released an album with only one good song on it and you can’t find a single? Well you had to rewind it all over again which made the hard days of depressive 15y-olds, sitting there on the balcony with a cigarette with a “Smiths” song on repeat even harder.

Some time later labels and pirates started to release the compilation cassetes and CDs with all the songs related to genres or mood. Which later with the introduction of MP3 players (especially iPods) involved to a new culture of music consumption — the playlists. Now with a service like Spotify you’re able to make a playlist with an eternal number of songs you like. You’re able to discover a new song, artist or even genre without going out to the music store in the other end of town. Everything is here, on your tiny device you’re holding in your hands right now.

Musicians have also changed. I’ll not dive too deeply into the aspect of music recording and production here, but in general it’s pretty simple to record a song at home comparing to the times 50 or even 20 years ago. It’s awesome that now you are able to spend a weekend and make a song, put it on Soundcloud or Spotify and be heard. Isn’t that amazing?

But are you the only one who did that today? The answer is no. Hundreds of new tracks were posted and in order to not get lost amidst other works you have to try harder.

Which is also cool as you need to evolve. You need to get better to be heard… but… eventually despite the fact your track is a masterpiece and thousands of people listened to it — sooner or later it will be forgotten by the majority of those people. Why? Because tomorrow there will be another song by another artist. If not tomorrow — maybe a few months later…

Why is this happening? Well mostly because of the variety of choices people have. We live in the rush, and we try to spend less time making decisions. So it seems like we care less about such things as the song we are going to listen next.

You’ve probably already guessed what I was trying to say with that big music paragraph?

Imagine yourself buying a toothbrush. You’re staying there at the mall, and see hundreds of them with different shapes, colors, features and prices. And in order to make the right choice you have to be conscious. You have to focus, think and spend some time to buy the exact toothbrush you need. The thing is that most people just don’t care, they buy one by the color they like and move towards the paper towels aisle to face the same scenario again. They don’t care about it in the same way they don’t care about the song playing while they are cooking or driving. It’s just a song from that playlist named “commute” or whatever.

Of course the time we live in and the variety of choices we have is incredible compared to 50 years ago. But sometimes we just aren’t educated or concerned enough to make a right choice.

Once again, I’ll talk about mindfulness and self-awareness later in the series, but the key is in conscious understanding of what type of content you’re about to absorb.

We are what we eat. And if you don’t care about what you eat you may end up having digestion problems. The same thing applies to what content you’re about to receive. The newspapers or articles you read, bloggers or videos you watch or the podcasts you hear. In the world with such variety of choices it’s very easy to get lost behind the options. And the moment you stop caring about what to choose — you stop caring about your mind hygiene. Your brain storage will be stacked by countless pieces of useless and unstructured information where you can barely find something you need this exact moment so you have to try harder and sometimes you can physically feel that. You may get nervous, your body energy is being used to remember the password from your bank account but all you can remember is how the hot knife slashes the can of soda… Yes, I exaggerate here, but you get the idea.

“On average, participants exhibited higher heart rate variability and higher skin conductance during negative news stories than during positive ones. But not all countries showed a statistically significant negativity bias, and there was a very high degree of variation in the negativity bias across individuals.”

This what happens to young your body when you read the negative news. Do you need all of that negative? Is that necessary for you? (By the way — that same study says that there are lots of people, who prefer positive news over the negative ones, so I hope that that trend will increase.)

I’m not a psychologist, but I think that if those negative experiences are essential to you — you probably need to analyse that. I’m trying hard not to make any buddhism or zen parallels here, but from the science perspective, emotional health is as important as the other aspects of your health. And the simplest way you can improve that is being conscious about what information you absorb and what emotions you experience. Such things as mindfulness and meditation are just instruments you can use to improve your self-awareness and consciousness. But if that’s something that’s “too much” for you start — with simple things.

Think about the information you receive during the day, especially from news and the social media as food for your brain. What feelings do you experience with the content posted by this or that newspaper or twitter account. Do you really need that? Maybe you need something different or maybe it’s time to put yourself on a diet? Maybe you don’t need to hear every day about how terrible the world is?

It’s not a “conspiracy theory”, the negative tone is a defining feature of the news and we all know the reasons behind all that big scary headlines about how terrible something or somebody is. But what I can tell from my personal experience — after a large cleanup of my newsfeed and subscriptions my emotional background has changed a lot.

Yeah, I know — the world is the same and all the horrible stuff I can’t do anything about is still happening out there every single day. But even tho’ I care about the world I live in — I’m no longer a slave of other people’s manipulations. I’m free from the content, promoted for clicks and for taking advantage of my emotions. My thoughts and emotions are mine. And it’s the least that I can do for my mind.

For a few years now I’ve been working on a product that is related to news and newsfeeds and had never thought about it as an opportunity for people to make their own emotional ration.

This post is not an advertisement of the products we make and about to release. But what we actually do is trying to contribute in making the world a better place. I will not disclose any of the details about the product lineup just yet, but I’d like to mention a few things here.

With bubblr news app you are able to subscribe to the predefined topics in different categories such as entertainment, lifestyle, business etc. Or you can create custom searches and follow the topics you’re interested in. You can stop receiving the news from the sources you don’t trust by blocking them.

It’s a small step on the road to mindful living.

Later in the article series I will talk about the other aspects of information and media. Not just because my job is related to it but because I care and I believe that our products can help people with their informational hygiene and emotional intellect.

Stay tuned to hear some thoughts about these topics and here are some cases, where our products can solve the modern day problems:

With Citizens Journalists we’re going to make a revolution in content validation by giving the instrument for content making and verification thus eliminating the whole concept of “deep fake” with a modern technology.

With the apps for Influencers we are able to bring the connection between the content providers and their audience by giving them an instrument that allows to get even closer.

And some of the upcoming products I can’t disclose yet.

One more “tool” you can put to your toolbox of mindfulness is two questions. It’s not related to information hygiene, but closely related to mindful living.

You can ask these questions in almost every situation, even if you don’t have any doubts in what you’re about to do or say, the questions are:

“Why do I need that?” and

“What will I get from this?”

By answering these questions you’ll be able to analyse your actions. What background stays behind them? Is that because of lack of self-confidence or other psychological complexes? What are the consequences?

And most probably you’ll end up by making a mindful decision.

Once again, I’m not a psychologist but I believe that if all people will ask themselves these two questions more often — all the psychologists will lose their jobs and the world will become a better place.

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