Can you remember anything significant from last week’s news that didn’t instantly slip through the quick sand of too much information? We have no way of connecting lasting productive emotions to the conveyer belt stories and are just serving as sieves – nothing really sticking, nothing making an impact, everything just trickling away, like blank screens on which events are viewed on, but the screen itself remains untouched, while another projection is already served and tragedies are followed by a line of jokes, sports, and weather, in a bipolar dissociated collage.

Information is not just information, equal on all counts to any other piece of itself. It depends on the medium it was received through and how it was presented, with what intention, on the order it had been given in and the “authority” it came from, as well as the biases it had already been filtered through. It depends on our readiness to hear it and on our closeness to the subject. If we read of a flood decimating a population of an exotic town we’ve never heard of it’s hard to feel the true deep compassion for what its inhabitants are going through when they are so foreign to us, when we were not even aware of their existence until now, when we know nothing about their culture and a way of life destroyed by said catastrophe. The news collage was not created to make you process things, just to receive them and stay tuned and it usually follows one of the 43 canonical stories. So news is not really that new, just the same stories over and over again, with the names, dates and locations changed. They are an archetypical merry go round, never meant to be remembered in its specific singular iteration at all.

Dispense with the news addiction and instead seek knowledge and wisdom. Search to know about the people of the nameless city you’ve heard about, and seek for ways to help. Extract wisdom form the overflow of information in the digital age, as an overlaps of structure showing through the cracks of thy hysterical attempt to get all of your attention. No one will teach us how to filter all of this influx to keep the paralytic effect of being bombarded by fragments without the big picture or any resolution to the emotions the news left you with. Don’t allow to get emptied by the passive regurgitation of the news, actively work on educating yourself on meta levels to see where this news fits into the larger narrative and how you can make an impact privately or locally. Don’t be a bystander, but a doer, the world needs more of those.