Mark Manson - Life Advice That Doesn't Suck
Curated from: markmanson.net
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You Are What You Consume
"When you choose what media to consume, you are choosing your future thoughts and perspectives and opinions. And if you choose poorly, you will think poorly."
In 1964, the media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously wrote, "The medium is the message." His point was that the way in which we receive information is often just as influential, if not more, than the content of the information itself.
McLuhan was likely inspired by the culturally turbulent 1960s and the newfound presence of a television in almost every home. He argued that television was a medium that inspired a kind of mindless passivity
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Why The Medium Matters
Unlike reading a book or listening to music, watching television takes an unbelievably little amount of effort. There’s a reason it’s widely recognized as the lazy man’s preferred mode of entertainment. You just set the channel and let it feed you endless images of pretty, exciting things. Pre-streaming TV was 24/7, on demand. You just kinda… sat there. The content was not designed to delight or inform as much as it is to keep you placidly watching.
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Why Reading Doesn't Suck
On the opposite side of the "medium is the message" spectrum is the written word. Reading has all sorts of cognitive benefits and it’s likely due to the nature of the medium itself.
For example, reading this takes mental effort. Unlike TV, the second you stop trying, it stops delivering. The concepts must be interpreted and then formulated and visualized within your mind. If I start writing about a confused donkey that continually tries to make love to a leaky fire hydrant, your mind sets to work constructing this fucked up scene in your head.
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Not only does your mind create it, but you get to dictate how you create it. Is the donkey lonely and sad? Is it being beaten by a cruel master as punishment? Or does the fire hydrant seem kinda into it?
Before this gets too weird, the point I’m trying to make is that reading is an inherently interactive medium. The conveyance of information is not only dependent on me writing these words, but also dependent on you actively choosing to read, interpret, and react to them.
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Benefits Of Choosing The Right Medium
This increase in mental creative effort then leads to all sorts of positive outcomes. Reading makes us more empathetic, improves our attention span, enhances logical reasoning, and so on and so forth.
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