Think on your thoughts, Read more, arm your mind !!

The world of podcasting is highly saturated. I have found a lot of knowledge in listening to thought provoking conversation between sincere participants. But it is not a substitute for reading a well thought out book. My reading took a backseat for a while, but now I am returning to it more than in past couple of years. Non-fiction books specifically. In a book you can’t just say flippant things for clickbait and get away with it, a serious book needs to provide credible resources.

Now, I am picking and choosing my podcast consumption very carefully. Conversations between non-clickbaity type, proper intellectuals (doesn’t mean uni grads/profs only) – non disingenuous type. But mainly prioritizing educational or historical pods (like mine jk lol). And there are many reasons that I have decided to take this step. One I have already explained is that most conversations cannot wholly replace reading and research. Other is that your mind becomes what you feed.

I understand most alt media people need to make a living as well just like MSM but there is a cost to injecting your mind 24/7 with outrage, ill thought out social opinions, political drama and hyped up disingenuous provocations. You become that. Pro or anti – left or right. You become a tool to be used for the profit of others. We need to disengage from extreme behaviour and extreme rigid dogmatic thinking. This is not healthy. This stops our mind from evolving. It close down routes of social redemption as well.

The other reason is that most social commentators out there are just agitators, outrage multipliers, pretenders. They don’t have good original thinking of their own. They piece together information from the conversations of other thinkers and just regurgitate it – clumsily.

And you know what the main problem with that is – other thinkers have had a structure to their knowledge. Most times in conversations with other such thinkers they don’t reveal all the mental groundwork it has taken them to come up with the thought they have now which can evolve when more work is done on it. That is the process of thinking and working things out. When certain social commentators just pick up one of their thoughts, regurgitate it and run with it, they are doing so without the groundwork and without understanding.

This is a danger. This is how you misconstrue thoughts. This is how you misinterpret them and yet sound smart because you are saying a part of something that can be true but you don’t really understand why it is true. This is a huge problem with knowledge without structure mixed in with incentivizing disingenuous engagement to create outrage dollars. I am not saying you have to go to school or uni, but you do need a structure and understand the role of biases in your input.

Guard yourself against this, it is a problem that has been ever growing. Extreme drive extremes. Thinking long and hard on your thoughts is essential. Develop critical thinking and bring some structure to how you absorb knowledge. Just listening to some podcasters who have high view or subscriber count and taking their words as gospel is probably one of the worst ways you can educate yourself – especially the younger generation because that will build negative thought practices. Think on it.