Inside my head

The information race is something that has been increasingly pressed upon us by the media. I might be behind on all the current affairs (nothing that touches me directly interests me and why should it?), but I'm not ignorant either.
I don't spend my time reading through piles of garbage blogs that try to sell something or just add another message about Obama or the crises. I search for what I need to know and thus keep my hands free for more important things.

The general consensus tends to be that more is better or bigger is better, or just anything needs to be better than before. That is consumerism at its best! People tend to treat information the same way, be it websites, the news or any other source, more, more and more, until we don't know what to believe any more.

That hunt for more causes stress. Fear of losing out, fear of knowing less than someone else. That fear is imposed on us, by... the media that provides it.

Do we really need to know the ins and outs of a distant war? Do we really need to know which celebrity wiped her bottom with such and such toilet paper? Do we really need to know what goes on in another country that doesn't have any influence on our tiny little lives?

The answer is of course NO! In order to survive we need to learn how to filter out the information we do NOT need.

The problem lies in the Globalization of information. Fifty years ago people read newspapers, listened to the radio when they wanted to hear something and the news hardly ever covered much from beyond the coverage area of the channel or the paper. Only some big events made it into the papers and even then, people skimmed through it, because they felt it didn't touch them. TV has been one hell of a bad influence in the next phase.

Personally I rarely watch TV. I've been ignoring the news, hypes, reality shows and all the garbage for nearly 20 years. When something is really watch-worthy people (who like to waste their time in front of TV) will tell me what is so great to watch and what not. And thanks to the same information age, I can pick and choose what I want to watch. The same applies to websites, do we really need to read everything about anything? Of course not.

We all need to shed the idea that we NEED to consume. Less is more in this case. Consuming less information leads to more personal freedom, which is what we're really after, I think. Many times people say "I don't have time for this". But what do they spend their time on instead? Nonsense, unsatisfying streams of information, commerce induced blogs (trying to sell something you didn't need in the first place) or generating those blogs in the hope the can gain a few dollars. I don't write for commerce, I'm sharing my life-experience, my different view on the world we live in.

I don't race. I don't participate in the rat-race, the information-race, the keywords-race... I take the lesser travelled roads at a slower pace and have a much more interesting life with less stress.

I hope this can inspire you to live with a little bit less stress.

It might have gone by unnoticed, (except for the few who knew) I have spent the last two weeks in the (mental) hospital. (A.k.a. the loony bin, the nut house, the funny farm, and so on.)
But now...

Expect some more soon. :)