Curating Your Mind
An Article of the Modern Survival Guide
This article is going to get a little weird and there’s a big risk that a reader could take it the wrong way. So let me start out by saying that, when you read what I write in the following paragraphs, you should have some cause for concern. I am not a doctor. I am not a psychiatrist or an expert in that field. This is just my opinion. It is worth exactly as much as the thoughts of the proverbial guy at the bar. This is an article for adults, about adults, don’t get it twisted. Cool?
Cool.
Ok, here we go. You should be actively curating what goes into your mind. That’s the meat of my advice here, and I’ll spend the rest of the article talking about what that means in detail, but the high level view is as follows:
Who you are, what you think, and your beliefs are largely dependent on what you experience. What you experience is only somewhat under your control. For that tiny bit of your experience that you do control, you have a responsibility to yourself to take some control over what goes into your brain. The information you consume sticks with you. It makes you what you are today, and what you will be tomorrow. It is important, and in this modern world of near-infinite information it’s very easy to let the wrong things in.
Are your alarm bells going off yet? They should be. I just handed you a gift-wrapped excuse to avoid anything you don’t want to hear, see, or think. I’m going to take just a moment to disabuse anyone who took that idea away from the prior paragraph.
Curating your mind does not mean that you avoid all uncomfortable topics and experiences. It does not mean that you believe only what you want to believe. It absolutely does not mean that you only listen to what you want to hear, or see what you want to see. These are recipes for ignorance, stagnation, and willful foolishness, and we aren’t about that here at the Modern Survival Guide. I’m interested in giving you tools to help you live, not locking you in an echo chamber that will get you stupid, broke, or dead. Be told.
What this process of mental curation does mean is that you take steps to limit unnecessary trauma. There are things that once you see, you can’t unsee, metaphorically speaking. Some of them need to be seen. But a lot of those things only need to be seen once, and a lot of other things only ought to be seen once in a while.
There are a lot of horrors out in the world that fit into this category of trauma, and a lot of mundane things that do as well. Let’s take a look at mundanity for a moment, before we delve into horror. Does everyone remember George Carlin? If you’ve never heard of him, go Google “seven words you can’t say on television” and have a watch. He was a fantastic comedian. In his later years he kept doing comedy but it started to veer into the territory of “irascible old man yelling about things,” much like Dave Chappelle. And he got bleak as he got older.
Why am I talking about an angry old comedian? Well, you can binge watch everything that George Carlin ever did online. It’s easy. Anyone can do it with a little searching and a little money, and if you like George Carlin it seems like a good idea. But if you listen to his work back-to-back for a couple of days, you are probably going to come out of that experience depressed. George Carlin will get in your mind, and if you don’t feed it anything else, George Carlin’s viewpoint will be the only thing in your thoughts for a while. Whether you agree with him or not, he will have an impact on your outlook.
Now, I’m definitely not saying that you should never listen to George Carlin. I’m simply saying that, much like binge-watching “The Walking Dead” or taking care of a relative with dementia as your full-time job, too much of a depressing experience will leave a mark.
Here’s the thing: that mark does not go away. It’s part of you now, unless you develop amnesia or something. Once you watch George Carlin once, a piece of George Carlin will occupy your mental landscape forever. It might fade with time, but it will impact your worldview permanently. In my experience, this is true whether you agree or disagree with the thing that has taken up residence in your mind; even the act of disagreeing with it means that you must acknowledge and consider it, and brains are funny about that sort of thing.
George Carlin is kind of a joke example, but scale up. Increase the horror rating. There are videos — LOTS of videos — of people being beheaded or otherwise dying in horrible ways littered all over the internet. There are articles, memes, pictures, and of course videos that propagate truly nasty hate speech scattered in all sorts of places. Wacky religious groups are always out recruiting, corporations with less-than-stellar human rights records are pushing propaganda, and political parties work hard every day to get you to hate and fear the other side. We are awash with information that is objectively not good for us in a truly staggering variety of ways.
Long story short (probably too late, but oh well), the information density of modern society is a minefield for mental health. It is far, far too easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of horrible crap that’s out there, and this does seem to be happening at an increasing rate. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the millennial generation and Gen Z have a higher incidence of mental health issues. I think increased reporting has a lot to do with it, but I also think that it’s increasingly easy to get stuck in depressing information.¹
There is a delicate balance to be found here. We are obligated to know enough about the world to make positive changes and protect ourselves and our people. We can’t get away from that, it’s part of being a responsible adult. Sticking our collective heads in the sand does absolutely nothing good for us. At the same time, it’s not good for us to open our minds to any and all information that causes mental distress or inculcates bad information. That path leads to anxiety, depression, feelings of helplessness, and ennui, among other things.
Hence, curation. An adult should take precautions to limit their consumption of horrific things, and counterbalance depressing stuff with happier information. Again, this is dangerous. D A N G E R, Will Robinson. Get this wrong, and you end up burying your head in the sand or believing some new-age conman who promises eternal youth through crystal therapy. Worse yet, this is on you. It’s not something you can effectively do for others, or expect others to do for you. It is in fact even more dangerous to expect other people to curate your mind for you, because surrendering control of what goes in there is how you get cults.
What makes it worse is that we do, actually, have to experience trauma in order to grow as humans. I can’t really grasp why the Holocaust is bad if I haven’t seen pictures of the death camps. It simply doesn’t work; the human psyche isn’t set up to be terribly afraid of abstract concepts. But every time I look at a picture of Auschwitz in full swing, that imparts on my psyche the horrifying truth that (a) this thing happened, (b) people did it, and (c) it could happen again. That’s pretty heavy stuff for a teenager… but that’s also exactly when we need to be exposed to this kind of information.
Correctly managed, this kind of mental trauma works like a vaccine. It inoculates minds against the horror of the world, prepares them to overcome adversity, and serves as an object lesson. If we don’t want the Holocaust to happen again on our watch (by the way, we have failed at that job several times, but that’s another story), we have to keep showing kids pictures of the Holocaust. We don’t have the luxury of living a trauma-free existence, and it’s worse than useless to try to shelter people from the evil of the world.
Managed incorrectly, mental trauma creates a downward spiral. It’s easy to spend too long looking at pictures of the Holocaust and get seriously depressed. It’s easy to watch the news every day and think the world is awful all over. It’s easy to listen to talk radio and think the immigrants are coming for your guns and women. It’s easy to listen to a hate-filled sermon and come away convinced that the Gay Agenda is trying to wipe away God-fearing Christianity. Going down this vicious spiral is always easy; the Dark Side is seductive, it offers simple answers and bleak outlooks, and it happily refers you to other sources of equally bad information.
All of this is to say that curation isn’t a simple process, it’s not something to take lightly, and it is still something you really ought to do. It is easy enough in concept, difficult in reality: manage what goes into your brain, because it’s never coming out. Balance out the dark with light. Input sources of hope to even the scales with despair. Read facts to counter the BS. Watch TV that makes you laugh as much or more than you watch TV that makes you cry. For every Maus that you read, add some Terry Pratchett.
But the proportions, the timing, the specific content? That’s all up to you, and it’s always going to be up to you. The moment you hand off this responsibility, you allow someone else to start taking control of your brain, and that is how the atrocities happen. Not all of the time, but more often than is comfortable, those who have control over other people’s brains use that power for evil. Don’t put yourself in the position of being a pawn for evil if you can help it (honestly, this is always a good starting position).
With that being said, here’s my advice in three parts:
- If you find yourself starting to think things like “this world is crap and there’s no point to living,” stop watching the news. That’s kind of a metaphorical statement; insert “x” for news, where “x” is whatever information you were consuming that was poisoning your mental landscape. Go do something else for a while. Take a walk in the sun. Call a friend. Have a nice meal. Play your favorite video game or watch your team on TV. Snuggle with your significant other. Whatever it is, get out of the environment that was causing you issues and introduce your mind to a new environment. Then, after a while, start watching the news again — but limit your intake.
- If you find yourself starting to think things like “those people are crap and have no redeeming qualities,” stop watching the news. Again, kind of a metaphorical statement; insert whatever TV show, talk show, or blog you’ve been watching for “news.” If you’re in this situation, you need to engage in some critical thinking and actively seek out opposing viewpoints. Balance the brain as much as you can, and come to a reasonable and logically defensible conclusion. I’ll just go ahead and state here that there are very few logical justifications for this kind of attitude.
- If you ever find yourself starting to think things like “this world is amazing and I don’t know why people are so upset,” start watching the news. You have missed out on trauma that is happening to others. This is as bad as, or perhaps worse than, being depressed because you’ve absorbed too much bad info. Ignorance feels blissful, but it also means you’re not doing anything to make the world better and you may actually be making things worse. Depression can be addressed, and is typically only dangerous for one person at a time. Ignorance is dangerous to everyone around you.
Mental curation doesn’t solve all mental health problems, and I’m not trying to say that it does. There are times when you really do need to talk to a credentialed therapist or change other factors in your life. Curation doesn’t really “solve” anything, for that matter; it’s a management technique and a philosophy to get you through your average day, because the catch is that we have to consume some of this information. We have no choice as responsible adults. Ignorance is not bliss, it’s just not knowing a rock is about to trip you.
We have no real option but to consume information that may be traumatic to our psyches. That’s life. But we can choose how much of it we let in, and we can manage what else goes into our brains. Sometimes, that’s enough.
¹In contrast, it seems like the majority of Boomers have found the absolute worst sources of information and latched on like ticks. Correct yourselves. Consuming bad information is even worse when you vote as a result.
