Staying Sane in the Era of Media Overload

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"You've got to live your life, son. You can't let the internet or media or the things around you tell you what to think or do, or fill you with anger. It will consume you. It will rob you of your peace and happiness. Life is too short for that." This, more or less, is the advice I have given to my young teenage son, who is bombarded daily not just with social media algorithms, but by the expressions of other students at school trapped in the mental vortex of anger, offense and outrage that so many seem to be caught up in.

I explain to him the diabolical nature of the algorithms, that it wants to keep you engaged and clicking, and so it keeps track of what you watch and sends more of it your way.

If you watch something outrageous that makes you mad, it will just feed you more of it, and before long, all you are seeing is one thing after another that makes your blood boil.

You begin to see the world through that lens.

You begin to think people are almost all terrible and stupid.

You start to feel disillusioned with society, the world - and life itself.

You become a cynic, and ultimately, you begin to lose hope in a better world.

"A lot of times, you've just got to turn it off and go outside," I say. "Go about your business. Be engaged with real people in the real world, ones you can see face to face, not just sitting behind a screen somewhere out there, feeling brave and reckless because they are hiding behind a wall of anonymity or because they aren't physically there with you."

It reminds me of the old Mike Tyson quote, I tell him. "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."

In other words, most people tend to think twice when they are dealing with people in real life. Maybe that doesn't always stop them from being belligerent and hostile, but it at least gives an incentive to be a little more polite and well-behaved.

A little more amicable.

We seem to have lost a lot of that, sadly. As we become more engaged with the internet's distorted reflection of our world, and less with the actual real one, discord is sown and we lose touch with our tangible reality.

Such is the malady of 21st century communication, this rising dawn of the digital age - which has already impacted the world so profoundly, in many ways for better, but in many ways for worse.

I used to listen to talk radio a lot more than I do now, I tell him.

It's not that I don't like commentary, or that I want to be uninformed.

Quite the contrary.

It's just that I can't listen to it for hours on end.

Too many hosts focus on the outrage and the anger, and while there are indeed many things worth being angry about in the world - one can't live a life consumed with rage. It's just not natural. It's not healthy.

The best we can do is remain informed enough, but keep a distance for the sake of our sanity.

And keep touching grass.

Keep engaging with others, face to face if we can.

Go do some service. Do some good in the world.

Look for opportunities to perform acts of kindness.

Maybe it sounds cliché, but those acts of kindness can be more for yourself than for others - because they will keep you grounded and nourish your soul. They will help keep the darkness out.

There is a place for righteous anger, we should not all be pacified and harmless.

But we must be balanced and not lose sight of what our own, personal lives really mean.

And we can't let that meaning become drowned out by the ceaseless droning of the media machine.

" 'cause knowing is its own answer, love something in a book"

-"Glass and the Ghost Children" - The Smashing Pumpkins