by magnora7
Even more than money and time, your attention is valuable. The whole industry of advertisement and entertainment is oriented solely around capturing peoples’ attention.
What you pay attention to determines what you think about. What you think about determines your beliefs and behaviors.
When you give your attention to lesser things, even just by hating on them, you are giving away your precious moments of focus. We only get so many seconds in this life.
Furthermore, by giving something unimportant a lot of attention, it brings it to the attention of others. This why the “5 minutes of hate” from Nineteen-Eighty Four is such a real concept. In this modern era of media, using our hate as a leash is just as oft-used as abusing our positive emotions. By keeping us hating the wrong things, our focus is misplaced, and thus we are controlled. Your precious seconds of focus must not be wasted on hating things that are unimportant, lest you waste your mental cycles and then never have the opportunity to see the truth. Lest your mind become clouded with emotions that don’t even need to be happening in the first place.
The opposite of love is not hate. It is ignoring. This is something that a lot of people don’t get. Ignore things that deserve to be ignored. This is a valuable skill that is almost completely hidden in our corporate-billionaire-owned mainstream culture, because understanding this fact deeply makes us far less easy to manipulate. When our emotions are free from manipulation, and we are not easily led to hate or infatuation by the media (including sites like reddit and saidit), we can think more clearly and about things that matter, and thus organize our lives and societies in a way that will keep getting better and better. We can focus on the things that matter.
If we are stuck in the doldrums of hating random idiots on twitter for “entertainment”, we waste our precious moments, and waste our opportunity improve the world in the small ways that are actually accessible to us. Instead of fighting internet scapegoats, or corporate-media-created personalities, what if we focused more on what affects us on the day-to-day? What could we accomplish if we weren’t dragged down by the weight of hating that which deserves to be ignored? How much extra time and energy would we have if we avoid fighting things we can just sidestep entirely? How much better would our culture be if we weren’t constantly promoting things just because of how much we hate them?
I think this is very important and needs to be talked about more. So much of modern culture (and the top-down manipulation of culture) centers around this mindset, and I think it’s counterproductive to humanity’s interests in the long run, and it’s time to evolve to something better.
Original Source with more comments: saidit.net/s/magnora7/comments/1rca/your_attention_is_your_most_valuable_resource/