Social Media Overload Is Making Me A Stylite

So, I switch on my Yahoo and I'm hit with a headline about the Police getting cheesed off with time wasters. Hmm I wonder, this might be relevent to me and so I click on it to reveal a story about the New Zealand Police force. This sort of typifies the deluge of news stories that intrude into our headspace minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day. New Zealand is on the other side of the planet to me and I'm getting worn down by being informed about the grief and hassles of all around the the world.

Human beings are not designed for taking on board loads of information. In fact we are designed to be the opposite. We have to act as a Cogitive Miser we have to shut out the noise otherwise we become paralysed and unable to operate in the world. Of course the stuff reported is bad, of course its bad for the people involved, but it ISN'T my problem!

My brain power and my emotional resources are there so that I can cope with the stuff life throws at me and my nearest and dearest not other people. That's not to say I won't sympathise or help out when I can, its just that being 'disaster bombed'in every news item means I have a growing sense of utter lack of of control of events in the world. Frankly its depressing. Its bad enough with the interjection of advertising messages. We really do have and 'advertised mind'

As Richard Petty said “imagine if you thought carefully about every t.v. or radio commercial you heard or advert you read…
if ever you made it out of the house …you’d probably be too mentally exhausted to do anything else”

So maybe I've reached a conclusion. I think I'm going to follow the example of The Sylites I'm going to make a conscious effort to stay apart from the news for a while. This blog is going to be 'my column' and I'll write about thoughts rather than events for a while. I wonder what will happen? Where will the inspiration of posts come from if there is not stimulus from the world? Is it really good for anyone to know about every event taking place in the world as it happens?