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Avoiding TV/Media

Desert Eagle

Space Monkey
space monkey
Joined
Aug 18, 2013
Messages
93
I realized over the past week or so that TV fuels this belief in me that I am nothing more than an orbiter in social situations. It makes people seem unattainable because I'm looking at the people on the television through a lens where I cannot act, because I am a simple viewer. I feel like that may be transferring to real life and explains why I often feel paralyzed in social situations and opt to remain nothing more than a viewer.

That, and just in general that TV/Media seem to be poor choices in activity and a general waste of time. I didn't watch TV much before writing this, and now I'm going to avoid it because it feels like it poisons my social instincts.
 

Chase

Chieftan
Staff member
tribal-elder
Joined
Oct 9, 2012
Messages
6,254
Yeah, TV's terrible.

There are good 'manly' TV shows out there, as I understand it - Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, Mad Men just naming a few I hear good things about but not having watched any of them.

The real bad stuff with TV are things like the reality television shows, woman-centric programming, talk shows, news, and commercials.

The news is highly feminized everywhere other than perhaps Fox News (whereas that one swings a little too far into the 'paranoid male' point of view).

The news is all hysteria and sensationalism, sadly, and news companies have templates they fill with the details of the day: latest rape, latest murder, latest school shooting, latest national disaster, latest stock boom or bust, latest IPO, latest soldier death or terrorist attack, latest 'this nation is fighting with this one', latest bird flu / swine flu / SARS / AIDS / ebola / killer bee pandemic that's going to wipe us all out. It feels very urgent and important, but none of it is.

Commercials are just as bad, because they're incredibly focused on making you feel a certain way to need their product and associate it with your desired outcome. Cars = sex; cola = happiness; shopping = following your heart, which in turn = contentment; those are the major ones. There's a lot of 'buy this for her and she will tear your clothes off' conditioning to make you associate spending money on products with getting love from women, which also leads to the 'do nice things for her and she will get hella horny for you' mindset that infects so many young guys and makes them think that all they have to do is dote on her a bit and she's going to rip their belts off with her teeth.

Maybe think of television as just one big indoctrination system where a bunch of different people with crap to sell you work overtime to make you believe what you need to believe in order to spend your money on their products. It's mind control for corporations, essentially.

Movies are nowhere near as bad, because you can pick what you want to watch and they tend not to be nearly as mindless as the news nor as indoctrinating as it or commercials. They still have some effects - all the 'doomsday prepper' guys out there are the result of too many zombie flicks plus a little too much Fox News - but they're far less despicable than television, which really truly does 'rot your brain'.

I'd also strongly suggest you quit reading the news online and quit all radio except classical music and older pop music that isn't pushing a strong agenda, to get yourself out of the habit of chasing down 'the latest and greatest' and all the advertising that goes along with it. A better choice are science news sites, like ScienceDaily.com, Nature.com, Sciam.com, and DiscoverMagazine.com, for some actual real news about meaningful-enough progress in the world. Other options are to fill your time with reading classics, like Machiavelli's The Prince, Sun Tzu's Art of War, Musashi's Book of the 5 Rings, or Plutarch's Parallel Lives. Far better use of your time than the mindless drivel you'll find on TV.

Chase
 
you miss 100% of the shots you don't take

Desert Eagle

Space Monkey
space monkey
Joined
Aug 18, 2013
Messages
93
Thanks for replying Chase! I never liked TV messages after taking the red pill. Been without it for years, only reason I ever considered cable was to use as a distracting mechanism if/when I bring a girl to my place.

Movies are nowhere near as bad, because you can pick what you want to watch and they tend not to be nearly as mindless as the news nor as indoctrinating as it or commercials. They still have some effects - all the 'doomsday prepper' guys out there are the result of too many zombie flicks plus a little too much Fox News - but they're far less despicable than television, which really truly does 'rot your brain'.

Funny story about movies. I was watching some Ryan Reynolds movies to more finely tune my wit, as I think the dude is hilarious and he pulls some hot girls. Ended up seeing most of his works so I decided to watch Just Friends. Starts out fine, but the ending felt just as toxic as TV.

I'd also strongly suggest you quit reading the news online and quit all radio except classical music and older pop music that isn't pushing a strong agenda, to get yourself out of the habit of chasing down 'the latest and greatest' and all the advertising that goes along with it. A better choice are science news sites, like ScienceDaily.com, Nature.com, Sciam.com, and DiscoverMagazine.com, for some actual real news about meaningful-enough progress in the world. Other options are to fill your time with reading classics, like Machiavelli's The Prince, Sun Tzu's Art of War, Musashi's Book of the 5 Rings, or Plutarch's Parallel Lives. Far better use of your time than the mindless drivel you'll find on TV.

Wow, thanks for the advice. I realized that I should stop reading online news kind of in conjunction with this, but now that you mention it music does push a lot of agenda in a catchy format, so I might do without songs that have poor messages.

I started reading Robert Green's 48 Laws of Power, which is the first non-fiction book that I bought for myself. I love it. I need to add those recommendations into my list for literature.
 
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