Have Social Media Hacked Your Simulation, and Madness Ensued?
Doesn’t it feel like something drastically changed in our reality about ten or fifteen years ago? What if social media and its influence on our minds caused the chaos?
The world’s always been a bit mad, I suppose. The madness of the last decade seems unprecedented, though. I wonder what changed?
In this publication, we look at everything through the eyes of a mind-made simulation. Our predisposition is that our minds create our reality in a very literal sense. The content of our minds is projected onto the screen of our reality - as within, so without.
In short, if you spend your attention on something, especially emotionally charged, it will multiply in your life - good or bad.
Our minds may be the screenwriters and directors of our perceived reality, but what programs our minds?
Take a moment and think about everything you consume daily:
What do you watch, read, and scroll through?
What do you talk about with others?
What does your self-talk contain?
Listen to the words you use almost unconsciously. Has the content you consume and talk with yourself and your fellow humans changed in the last ten or fifteen years? I would imagine it has. Mine sure did.
A gigantic problem with social media
There are many more problems. We’ll focus on three:
Social Media (and media in general) exuberate the extremes in our society: extreme danger, madness, insanity, profanity, division, the worst of violence, extreme ideologies, and edge cases seem like normality. The most impactful and viral things are always the ones that impact our minds and emotions the most, and social media thrives on our attention and engagement, so it pushes those forward.
The end result is that we see so many of these extreme cases that we start to believe they are everywhere, ordinary, and overwhelming in our society. If I were to judge our society by my social media feeds alone, I would just go and hang myself. Luckily, I know it’s an illusion, a twisted image of reality tailored to what I engage with, which is mostly the things that anger me the most, but not all of you do.
Social Media’s algorithms are designed to serve each user the content it engages most with. Unfortunately, that doesn’t only mean cute kitties but also all the things you are passionate about that irritate you the most, scare you to your bones, and the things you absolutely hate.
Like our simulation, tailoring to our mind’s content and focus, social media’s algorithms don’t differentiate between what we love - want more of, and what we hate - want less of. If we give it attention and engage with the content, whatever it is, it will serve more of it to us.
This mind-made simulation works almost the same way, and this is the problem with how much time we spend scrolling through social media and watching the news. We are filling our minds with extreme ideas, ideologies, and edge cases, now perceiving them as the norm (everyone is crazy, the woke mind virus is coming for us all, the immigrants are raping women all over the place, black people keep beating up white folks, natural disasters are everywhere, the pandemic is killing everyone, vaccine injuries are dropping bodies all the time, all food and water is poisoned and bad for your health, the lizard Jews are running the world and plotting your demise on this flat Earth… kind of madness).
Since this is our mental input, we’re starting to believe it subconsciously, and—as within, so without—that means it has to manifest in our reality. Our minds create our individual (or collective) reality/simulation by what they contain, regardless of whether it’s objectively true or not, liked or hated, possible or impossible. Whatever you believe and think about becomes real in your simulated reality, as the mind is all.
Social media reality is not real word reality, but it’s becoming so more every day
We always said that we understand the internet isn’t the real world, right? We rationally understand that what we see on the internet, the news and our social media feeds isn’t an accurate representation of reality. Some of us do, anyway.
It’s becoming blatantly obvious that those comically insane and unrealistic ideas, thinking, characters, and talks are becoming a part of our daily lives. Just think of conspiracy theories as one example. Remember how you first had to dig deep to find the more ludicrous ideas on the internet?
Then, it became easier and easier, but you still had to look for them. Now, like it or not, conspiracy theories are everywhere. All over your feed, all over the news, and in your daily conversations with people who were never interested in fringe ideas and would never have questioned authorities on anything but are now more and more like those tin foil hat dudes hiding in their basements.
Your counterargument might be: yes, but there’s a reason for that. More people see through the veil and recognize they’ve been lied to, see the propaganda, and have lost faith in experts and authorities. I agree. But then, I’ve always been a conspiracy theory lover, and I have an inherent distrust of authorities.
The thing is, we didn’t even dare discuss those ideas in public for fear of being thought of as insane. Now, we can have the craziest discussions with our parents, neighbors, coworkers, and grandparents—so much so that I tend to back away because everyone seems to take all the craziest theories as somehow proven facts, and that’s not a good idea most of the time. I have to be the one bringing conversations back to reality: “Chill, grandma. The lizard people aren’t coming to get you!”
The crazy internet sphere is merging with our real lives. It’s becoming impossible to differentiate the internet's “fake reality of extremes” from our actual reality. Not to mention that reality doesn’t exist as we live in a mind-made simulation, but whatever. Maybe we are all becoming crazier and crazier, more violent, more frightened, and more delusional with time. Here’s my question:
Would it happen without our focus on the media and spending hours each day on social media?
I don’t think it would. I believe that the version of society that never invented social media and ours, which is consumed by it, would look very different, all other things being equal. Then again, maybe we did (quantum) jump into another reality as some interpret the Mayan calendar (remember that whole thing?), and we’re now in the “crazy” timeline. Come to think of it, I’m sure we are in the crazy timeline and have left the “normal” one behind right around that time. I just blame social media and not some ancient Mayan prophecy.
Interested in some stories from parallel universes? Seek no more - check out Interdimensional Talks on Zediction.
Social media has caused one more disaster - it broke the mainstream media
No, it was never perfect, but since all our information and attention is now on social media, the news networks must compete for our attention. How do they do this? By giving us the kind of content our social media feeds give us. They need to shock us with ridiculous titles, enflame our emotions, frighten us to our bones, and make us want to vomit with each title we read.
The days of relatively objective, nonpartisan, calm reporting you could count on are long forgotten. Unfortunately, that doesn’t sell, and all these news outlets need your attention to sell ad space. No attention - no money, so they adapted. They’ve become worse than social media, and I didn’t think that was possible!
Essentially, all our news sources depicting the state of the world through our screens have become abominations. Since these are our windows into the world, we now believe what they’re selling, and our reality (simulation) reflects that.
Many people are asking why everyone is so scared and anxious all the time. How could they not be considering the content they consume?
Rethink what you consume and talk about
Understand that your reality is just like a social media algorithm. It only gives you more of what you focus on, what you consume mentally, and what you believe. It doesn’t judge whether you like it, hate it, want it, or don’t want it.
The universe, or in our vocabulary, the simulation, only has one answer: YES!
Whatever you say about anything and everything - YES, it’s true. Here’s more proof of that.
Whatever you believe - YES, you are right. Here’s more proof of that.
Whatever you resist and fight - YES, you are right to resist these things. Here are more things to resist and more of what you fight because you focus on them.
Whatever you fear - YES, you are right to fear it. Here’s more proof of that and more things to fear.
Whatever you hate - YES, you are right to hate it. Here’s more proof that you should hate it and more things to hate.
Whatever you like and appreciate - YES, you are right to appreciate it. Here are more things to appreciate and like.
Whatever you love - YES, you are right to love these things. Here are more things to love.
Be careful what you wish for is only a tiny part of the truth
Be cautious of what you read, think about, watch, and talk about—be careful what you consume. Be careful what you contemplate, what you believe, and what you dislike, hate, resist, and fight. In short, if you spend your attention on something, especially emotionally charged, it will multiply in your life - good or bad.
Social media has made sure we now live in a crazy ass world that was peak comedy only a decade ago. Watch the movie Idiocracy if you want a lovely reminder that we are indeed living in one such a world. Why?
Because that is the content we consume, and it has, in return, consumed us. We’ve created this world. No one else did.
You’re in control of the simulation - you’re never the victim. Don’t forget that and become a gatekeeper of your attention or suffer the consequences.