Oh, I remember my dear mom harping on me constantly, “You are what you eat, son!”
“Yes, I know, mom. But can I please have one more Pop Tart, please?”
That simple advice, “You are what you eat,” would alleviate 30% of our chronic illness in America. It’s widely acknowledged that overprocessed foods are both seductive to our senses while seriously harmful to our physical well-being.
Mom was right, yet she didn’t go far enough in her simple advice. She should have said, “Son, become what you consume. And by ‘consume,’ I mean not only through our mouths, but through our eyes, ears and associations.”
Simply put, we’re organisms that will become what we make of them by consumption of food or food-like-products, by the content we read and watch, by how we’re tracked and marketed online, and by how we choose to educate ourselves and keep ourselves up to date.
In America, perhaps like no place else on Earth, we have the latitude, freedom and responsibility to become the best of what we can make of ourselves.
Our society generally provides the tools for self-success … If we are aware, awake and sufficiently motivated to grab onto the good stuff while ditching the bad.
Back in my old Mormon missionary days, I had a mission president who was fond of the adage, “Emphasize the positive and eliminate the negative.”
Maybe a little pithy, but when boiled down, it’s good advice. Whatever your hand is reaching for, be it food or news or entertainment or friendships – when you reach out, go for the positive stuff, and avoid the bad.
So long, double cheeseburgers and fries with a Big Gulp. So long, endless doom scrolling on phone screens. Bye-bye, dumb social media brain-numbing addictive 30-second videos and screen screamers.
See you later, friends of bad influence.
A few nights back, Carrie and I watched the wonderful movie, “Good Night and Good Luck.” It’s 20 years old but is dead-on timely for today. George Clooney and a cast of truly great actors takes us back with a historical drama shedding light on the high-stakes conflict between veteran TV journalist Edward R. Murrow and Red Scare High Priest, Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
These were far different days than today. America had three major TV news networks, along with dozens of great regional and national newspapers and hundreds more fine regional ones.
Back then, there was a hot war between news and government over a post-war out-of-control commie witch hunt that ruined careers and entire lives.
Watch the movie. It’s a good wake-up call to keep your head fresh. It’s about dedication to serve the truth and having the guts to back it up.
Today, we have far less nationally trusted newscasters contrasted with far more Facebook, TikTok, millions of bloggers, and all the rest of the internet, pouring junk content down any throat some algorithm decides you personally need to see.
Know this: With the advent of artificial intelligence, what you are presented and what you are urged to consume, from news to entertainment to food, will be curated “just for you” – by machines that have tracked you from nearly birth. The “truth” you are served might be quite different than the next guy’s custom curated “truth.”
Scary stuff.
To use an overly worn phrase, “It’s a rigged system, folks.” Much of “news” is now really just opinion. We’ve lost track of where news ends and opinion start and separating pervasive marketing from all of it.
Go watch the Super Bowl. Count the minutes of advertisements compared to content. Try out a visit to “Crypto.com” arena for a Lakers Game, or Dodger Stadium. First, you pay big time for the tickets, then you’re subjected to hours of commercial promotion in the 365 screens surrounding the field or court of play.
There’s no escaping our incessant marketing and advertising influence.
But we are what we eat, and we become what we do, and the information we let into our brains determines how we think. That’s the bottom line.
While we’re still sentient, with at least fleeting moments of unencumbered freedom of choice, we must choose to keep ourselves free. And I’m not talking about hanging the gun rack in your Dodge Ram or wearing hats of certain colors or being glib when we add our proud pronoun pronouncements at the bottom of our emails and thinking we’re free.
Freedom is so much more than these mere culture war tokens we’ve been sold as real freedom.
Rather, if we want to remain truly free, we must choose “clean.” We must curate what we read, watch and learn. Just as with food, there’s a smorgasbord of everything to pour into our heads.
We’re forever being sold — something — by someone, somewhere, with sophisticated means. More than ever, we’ve got to watch the ingredient list when choosing content to consume. For work, play, education, entertainment.
In a tech-led world full of manipulative algorithms, what and how we feed our brain is right up there with how we feed our bodies.
We’re facing an uphill fight, but it’s one we must win to be truly free and healthy people.
Gary Horton’s “Full Speed to Port!” has appeared in The Signal since 2006. The opinions expressed in his column do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Signal or its editorial board.