I haven’t made a post in a while, haven’t done one of these in a while.
Absolutely everything is an ad. Even the things you watch or read, that are the purpose of running ads, are ads. Even beyond the ad read by the talent. Some of the people on your favorite discord or federated servers are ads. As in paid actors furthering a message for someone else. Plants. Bots. As in not even real people. Chatbots for the purpose of pushing an ad.
No secret knowledge to progress. Just time, consistency, application.
There is no actually secret knowledge. Not real knowledge anyway. If it’s part of reality it has been worked into every structure of engineering and application such we can’t avoid talking about it. If it’s secret knowledge, and true, then it is useless or gossip. Yes, politics is gossip fundamentally. You may not know how to make a nuclear weapon, that explicit knowledge may be kept from you, but the fundamentals are not. It’s talked about regularly.
To their fault, nobody cares about what is, only how things appear.
There is no one simple thing. There is no magic pill. There is no little thing you’re doing wrong that is absolutely transformative if you stop, or you start… especially if you buy it (Unless you have an actual disease or nutrient deficiency, and you find out fixing that and figuring it out isn’t necessarily simple.)
Highlight reel… Genetic anomalies… exceptional presentation… made normal. Social media is a curse. Your brain thinks this is normal. It doesn’t take into account what you see daily in the real world as normal, it takes what you see & hear from things close to you. As in your fondle-slab. Your brain thinks your phone is your best friend and takes news & media from it as it is. Then lenses your experience of the world as if that’s your tribe. Then… compares you and your whole experience to that tribe without consideration for presentation and curation. Top that off with advertising and marketing coloring even your day to day experiences… problem.
Most of us are extreme generalists, pretty good at everything but not amazing at anything. Competitions are won on amazing. Day to day life, survival, rewards variety of competence.
Things humans have been doing forever aren’t the problem. Eating at a specific time doesn’t make you fat (or skinny, or strong). Most animals (including you) can handle chemicals and toxins in the environment. Everything is a chemical, nothing is perfect, and some plants decided they wanted to hurt things that eat them. If an animal couldn’t handle some level of imperfection in their environment it didn’t reproduce. Those fragile animals are not in your ancestry.
Most things you’re being sold don’t move the needle enough to matter, or can’t. One reason they don’t is so more can be sold. What they are is easy. Effective doesn’t matter. If the marketing is such you look like you’re in the cool club by using the product even more so.
If the key to something working is that you only must buy it, it doesn’t work. There must be consequences outside of the transfer of funds. Side effects, work you need to do, schedule to upend, change in diet, adherence to some kind of discipline, appointments to meet, skills to have, etc.
20 years ago was not 1980, it was 2005. Covid started almost 6 years ago. Half a decade. Nothing got better. Nobody was held accountable and will not be. It never actually ended.
Information warfare dynamics… the war has been on going and we’re all casualties and participants. We do not recognize the weapons, the attacks, or even when we’ve been hurt or pulled to one or the other side, and thus we do not recognize it as combat.
There is a lot of “information” that is rooted in all of our minds that is not true that has been absorbed through the culture without critical thought. Things from movies, magazines, the internet, tv shows… basically entertainment. That are just not so. But, because there is no obvious counter to that information already in our minds and it seems plausible we take it as true without question and actually make decisions on it! This is conventional wisdom, common sense. This is the zeitgeist. It is wrong. Factually incorrect. It’s not from reality, it’s from entertainment. It affects everything from knowledge and feelings about political parties, how economics works, how the government works, law generally, religion, how stores make money, anything… some of your knowlege or impressions of some topic come from entertainment.