The structures you're stuck in and the influence of the global media machine
Start thinking about the different stages your life is playing out on and how you are mostly not directing the action at those levels but are subject to their limitations.
So, you’re still alive, still here, well done! Now what?
We are all stuck in structures and situations, lots of them, which create different roles, relationships and obligations, and which determine limits or opportunities in some layer of our existence, even sometimes survival itself, for some period of time, now or into the future.
The news is full of interesting, if extreme, examples that constantly grab our attention.
Take a country that goes to war with another country (Israel, Iran, Ukraine, Russia, etc.). The political and military elites decide such things and the citizens are forced to accept whatever happens and their new role choices: fight or not fight.
If you fight, you might be a volunteer or a conscript; if you don’t fight, perhaps you try to secure some essential position far from the front lines or become a conscientious objector facing prison and the scorn of the tribal majority; or perhaps you try to flee into exile. In the worst case scenario, you become a victim of the other side’s rockets and bombs.
Or what happens when you take a flight somewhere, or a train, or even jump in a car with someone else driving? As soon as you are on board, the doors are closed, the engines turning and the vehicle is moving, you role is restricted to passenger: you are entirely in the hands of the pilot or driver…
You all then depend on the integrity of the manufacturer, engineers and mechanics who built and maintained the vehicle, as well as whatever traffic control systems exist for that form of transport: radios, controllers, signals, lights to coordinate multiple vehicles moving around the same spacetime.
And we are all economic agents within the modern global financial system that has evolved since the Englightenment and Industrial Revolution.
You have some kind of a job or investment capital or business venture. You own, are still paying for or rent a home.
You must interact with the urban and infrastructure system in some way, whatever you believe about climate change, or perhaps you are so far out in the countryside that your government has forgotten to provide proper public services there.
And of course you are subject to modern bureaucracy in all its onerous forms: taxes, licences, permits, courts.
Conscripts and victims do not get to decide the start and end of the wars they are thrown into; passengers may not just take control of their airplane or train; and you must keep struggling to pay your bills and taxes somewhere.
You are not suddenly going to become president of your country, the captain of your plane or Robin Hood in feudal England, stealing some treasure from the Sheriff of Nottingham in the morning before riding into Sherwood Forest to enjoy some roast deer and apples in the evening with your friends.
When those structural things go wrong, and they frequently do, your relationship to them then affects whatever closer relationships and direct plans you held before, as so many realtives and friends of the victims of wars, plane crashes and economic hardship suddently and tragically discover.
Most of what you read in or see on the news is made up of such stories of destruction, failure, collapse, disaster and neglect, hence the generally negative effect on our attention and psyche.
And the bigger the structural situation, the more it affects the lives of many people.
As depressing as it all sometimes gets, and governments and the media don’t help when they pound some bad situational story repetitvely or for propaganda ends for weeks or months on end, the stream of bad situations never really seems to end, even if you choose to switch off your TV for a few months or throw your smartphone away.
In the past few days alone, we have seen the violence and suffering in Gaza turn into more violence and suffering in Iran and Israel and the horrendous and very sudden crash of Air India flight 171 in Ahmedabad. Your national news likely contains multiple shocking examples of more personal violence and anguish.
Fortunately, and statistcally, most of the extraordinary (and distant) stuff you see on the news will never actually happen to you but you can observe that it does indeed happen to someone, somewhere, pretty much every day, and it doesn’t leave you indifferent, does it?
Watching the news and doom-scrolling horrible videos and images on your smartphone become real-life versions of the vicarious emotional involvement in the lives of other human beings that is exactly what Netflix provides in a more narrative format, as well as hooking millions of people into things like true crime, which blurs the lines between the harshest real-life suffering and narrative entertainment.
You can’t help but care about and feel genuine emotion for those situations and issues and the people involved, whether it is climate change and natural disasters, politics and ideology, or the victims of wars, plane crashes or serial killers.
It is all still part of your or our world. It doesn’t mean you or I can do anything about most or any of it but the stream of events does enter your awareness, bounces off whatever layers of past context and meaning you have already accumulated in life, and generates new emotions and meaning.
And that’s where it ties into Human Loops: we are always generating new meaning based on an always changing world, which is structured at many levels in our lives.
The stories affect your perceptions of the state of your world and your feelings about it. We are, if you like, passengers on a global news machine or conscripts to an international media war that never stops: it’s always there when you wake up, full of the failures of the different systems and the real or imagined horrors of life.
It takes real effort nowadays to stop that constant stream of notifications, alerts, messages and images from the media in general, from your social media apps and from your friends on WhatsApp.
And we only have limited attention each day, so even when we make an effort, this general flood of stories, whether real-life or entertainment, affects our minds, our perceptions and the meaning we create in our real lives too.
Time we spend attending to distant, extraordinary matters is time we do not spend attending to closer, more mundane but in almost all cases more personally relevant matters at the individual, family or work level.
So we have sort of a Russian doll situation with the layers of structures and situations in our lives, each of which might be actually more important and to each of which we might pay more or less attention, and that affects how we generate meaning in the now and the outcomes we get.
And the structures and situations are one of the easiest parts of the Human Loops framework to become more aware of: just start writing down the details of the different ones you are currently involved in and see how they influence you. The more visible you make them, the better you can think about them.
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