It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.
—C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book Four: Chapter Eight
Dear Reader,
Across every age and culture, the break of dawn has called each person to face the day's labors. C.S. Lewis captured this initial, ancient struggle in the first moment of groggy consciousness. But today, we wake not only to our own duties, but also to a hundred intruding thoughts, many of them provoking disquiet, anxiety, and restless distraction. Passivity-inducing preoccupations.
We all consume media for information and pleasure. You are reading this Substack, or perhaps listening to the voice generated by the app. And I hope you enjoy my writing. Unfortunately, much of our media was never built to foster joy or reflection, or where that was once its promise, it has since abandoned it. I remember when Facebook was new and you had to have a college email to get it. I remember when Twitter first popped on the scene. I even remember when I stopped checking Myspace. However, the new trend in media is generating clicks by inducing anxiety, fear, and feelings of inadequacy. You can see its impacts on the very young and the old. Your mind and heart are your castle and keep to defend. Stop letting the orcs in.
In the article “Sycophancy in Middle Earth: Why is obsequiousness so hard to defeat?” Virginia-based professors, Drs. Deborah and Mark Parker argue that through the character Grima Wormtongue, who deceives, and the formerly heroic character King Théoden of Rohan, J.R.R. Tolkien shows how sycophants don’t just degrade themselves, they also infect and enfeeble their victims, dragging down the leadership of societies. “Slime slimes its object,” they write. I think that some of our feeds are doing Wormtongue’s work; they manipulate and enfeeble us, producing passive resignation or crippling anxiety. It can be an especially miserable form of mental subjugation.
In today’s world, self-care means intentionally curating your feed. Because if the voices in your feed leave you weaker than you were, they are not informing you, they are infecting you. You were not made to carry the anxieties of a dozen strangers before you had your coffee. Nor before you go to bed. The bad political economy of the last decade has incentivised the development of surveillance capitalism and content created to ensnare by mapping your weaknesses or warping your interests. But many of us have invested a lot of time in these platforms and news outlets, and not everyone is a bad actor. However, even as the platforms decay into a ghetto of cheap ads, conspiracy bait, and envy-inducing curated “lives,” they retain a haunting pull; the sense that if you leave, you are not just logging off a website, you are quietly stepping away from a part of your own story often shared with family and friends you haven’t seen in years, especially since we languished through the trauma of Covidtide. It is nostalgia wrapped in surveillance, familiarity wrapped in brain rot. And that is a hard thing to quit. So you have to curate it yourself by being extra vigilant about what you consume. Companies like Meta or News Corp do not care if their clickbait harms you. They are generating revenue whether the messages you receive are good or bad. So you have to take control. Pick and choose how you engage.
"For they cannot sleep unless they have done wrong; they are robbed of sleep unless they have made someone stumble." Proverbs 4:16
There are distinctions between awareness and fear, and between humility and anxiety.
In 1860, a small group of young American nationalists in New England rallied to defend an abolitionist speaker from the South against a group of anti-abolitionist militants. The next month, Abraham Lincoln himself spoke as part of his tour to win the Republican nomination for president. The young men rallied to him, and their movement spread because they saw the danger to the country from pro-slavery oligarchs. They were called the Wide Awakes. Importantly, the Wide Awakes were not fearmongering; they organized for Lincoln and the preservation of the Union, and they were right: the Civil War broke out a year later. They were alive to the threat; they were ready to face what came. And those Yankees won that war. They were aware, not afraid.
Likewise, having humility is to have an acute awareness of yourself and who you really are; it comes from the Latin words humus, meaning ground or earth, and humil-em, low, lowly, small. To be humble is to be grounded. Not to be induced to feelings of inadequacy and anxiety by your feeds. Be aware of who you are, your faults and good points, and stop letting this post or that make you envious or have you doubting your friends or significant others. And especially stop letting other people project their faults onto you. Break free. Be humble, not anxious. Maybe check your Facebook on a computer browser, but maybe delete the app from your phone and tablet.
We should consume media that informs us, keeps us humble, connected with friends, and aware of the world around us. And especially you should read, like, and subscribe to Outside the Academy. Ultimately, you must be the curator of your life.