The War For Your Attention

in #psychology6 years ago (edited)

If you are reading this, then you have triggered an automatic behavioral response to an environmental stimuli in the form of words of symbolic language in the medium of text read by your eyes on an illuminated screen.

The body of diction before you is dictating and authoring the space in your psychological processes known as the visual-spatial-notepad. Quite literally your mind’s eye, and ear, is streaming self-generated content due to visual exposure to these terms.

The trick of language as an art, as Alan Moore would call, “literal magic,” is modern day shamanism and mystical influence, watered down into cheap tricks for entertainment and consumer “motivation.”

The discipline of communicating with this technology is convoluted in daily, unconscious exchanges with those real people we are exposed to in our lives.
Yet throughout the day we are prey to the manipulation of professional utilization of this form of influence.

Consider the advertising industry, where every waking second of your day is a battlefield for your attention. Billboards, television, radio, websites, and smartphones are all channels through which your attention is taxed and your life energy spent involuntarily.

Buzzwords, terms of emotion, inflammatory speech, the arsenal available to promoters for clickbait are a drain pump sucking at your personal hourglass. Recent expositions of social media agents have elaborated on the intention of attracting user attention via insidious neurochemical programming, aka conditioning.

The state of society is that of a psychological warzone. Business, advertising, politics, religions, and cults alike are all weaponizing language to take your time, to influence you through the subtle arts of persuasion, to cause you to react.

Consider this a reminder, so that you may arm your mind with consciousness and awareness of the art you are exposed to.

Because blinking can be a somatic, voluntary process.
Our teeth feel hard to our tongues.
Our toes wriggle, sometimes without our own original inspiration.
Our breath comes and goes without our intentional breathing.

Meditation is not a fruitless activity.
Meditation is an exercise in resistance.