Stimulation saturation: Bending things back to basics
Channel: Quest for a Meaningful Life
Date: 2019-10-19

So it seems like something that repeats every day, forever, is this necessity to bend things back to basics. 
We're always being distracted. 
We're always being led around, led away from our core principles, our basics, our foundation in life. 
There are so many influences that pull us in so many directions, and it's a simple thing, but it is such a basic thing with our lives. 
I mean, just looking at the kind of environment we live in, the amount of stimulation and distraction, the amount of forces calling for our attention, is vast. 
And with portable technology and seemingly continuous access to new information, new stimulation, this trend has gone into overdrive. 
I imagine what it might have been like in older times. 
You know, it's easy to kind of simplify and imagine and romanticize the past. 
I think in many ways, a lot of what was going on in the past would be surprisingly similar, in some ways, to what we see now. 
You imagine ancient cities: they would have been very busy and lively and chaotic, absolutely. 
But there's something about when I imagine ancient times that there just would have been more time for a break. 
There would have been more quiet time, or at least time without new information being delivered. 
There was the darkness of night, and there was the silence of nobody talking. 
It really is the price of our media. 
We have so much media coming in that silence is the price we pay. 
Background music, background radio, video playing, alerts coming in, new video and audio popping up. 
There is just so much noise. 
It's calling for our attention. 
It's attempting to influence us. 
And here we are, just these untrained people that we don't have any clear method to resist this influence. 
We are not trained to handle this kind of stimulation and distraction and still be able to keep our focus. 
We simply grow up into this world of absolute saturation. 
So this is our task, every day, repeatedly through each day, it seems, to just have to put the pause on the way our mind is racing, the way our minds are pulling towards something. 
We have to put the pause on and bend ourselves back to what we consider to be our our basics. 
In so many ways, it is a great blessing and a wonderful thing to be able to have so much richness of media and input and information and sources that are readily accessed. 
This is a great wealth for us and a great benefit, a gold mine for us to extract useful tools and great value. 
But with the overwhelming effect of this saturating, soaked media, our minds soaked and saturated in media, we need to ask ourselves, what is our basic? What is our foundation? What is the baseline? What are our core principles that are important to us? What are the basic things that I need to be doing and the basic things that I believe in? We need to be clear about what those things are, and that's a whole journey in itself, of course, to identify and express those values, those principles. 
But even if we only have some hint of them, if we don't have them fully formed, we have some sense of what our values and principles are, we need to again and again remind ourselves of those values and principles, and we need to bend ourselves back to them. 
With each new wave of influence that hits us, we straighten ourselves back out, realign ourselves with OUR vision. 
And that seems to be a necessary ingredient in future survival.