Nosce Te Ipsum
Marcus Alden Meredith
January 29, 2025
Nosce Te Ipsum“Know Thy Self”
I was practicing on my language app the other day on my phone. I have been a very diligent student of French (4+ years on the app) and I recently decided to “double up” by starting Italian too. In the process of doing some exercise to “reach my goal” for the day, I had to use my reward points I’d accrued. So I did what I always did when asked about using my point. I clicked “YES”, then unexpectedly it asked for money to “buy more points.”
“What? I should have plenty left, like 10,000 pts.!”
I didn’t.
They were at zero!
Either I’d done a terrible job of keeping track (which, in hindsight, may be the case) or I had been robbed by the app company! “Why you bastards!” I thought. But a timed portion of the lesson was running out in the app and I didn’t want to “drop down” in my ranking - so I paid a couple of bucks. I fumed…. grumble, grumble, rant, rant…. on further reflection and thought it made me examine my state of mind with a more skeptical and analytical eye. “What was I really doing? Remember what the ancients said…. Nosce te ipsum: ‘Know thy self.’ That’s what the Oracle at Delphi had written on it’s entrance.”
Now I’ve been trained in psychology and I had the presence of mind to ask, “Why am I feeling this way?” I’m a Stoic and disciplined self-reflection is a hallmark of that school of philosophy. I began to analyze… “Well, because you’ve just realized you’ve been played, like a cheap violin.” I sat back and began to realized I’d been manipulated by the app to “care” about this utterly unimportant competition with people on-line I had NO inkling or awareness of. Neurologically, the app had weaseled and manipulated its way into my dopamine/rewards center of my brain like a virus and hijacked the stimulus-rewards response… I’d been suckered. “Damn it.” Now I was really pissed… Stimulus-Reward. I should have seen it coming.
You may see this story as no big deal and in the grand scheme of things and you’d be right. But the insidious ease with which I was played peaked both my anger and my awareness. “How many ways are we all being played?” The key to the question is to look closely at all the ways we interact with things… not just tech, but all our worldly activities. Our interactions on-line, the way we get involved with our entertainment or news intake, how we make the choices of our food and even the socio-religio-political views are suspect and in need of a serious assessment. For instance, I really started with my language app because it offered good lessons in a way that we “naturally” learn languages and the local community college was not offering “in-person” instruction in French (it was the Pandemic at the time I started so that made sense back then). But, somewhere along the way, I got suckered into caring about competing with other learners - used as a motivational factor but also utterly ridiculous because that was not my original purpose in using the app. But competition and reward are a subtle demons and they possessed my thinking far too easily before I exorcised it from my studies. “What else should I be cautious and make a careful analysis of?”
Sports, religion, politics, “pop” culture are just a few of the subjects that immediately came to mind. But don’t think that’s all, you see, because the tech and advertising communities of companies are constantly on the hunt for ways to separate “you” from “your money.” Even if their efforts result in us having increased tribalism, isolation, false equivalencies, and pure ‘fadism’ they are like the shark constantly on the prowl for a quick meal (and they are not sullied or slowed by morals in the process). Now this is not a new message, not by a long shot. But the constant drone of the quick fix from tech, commercialist forces, and the sports industrial complex can be hard to keep at bay, much less under control. And depending on how you were prepared to see the world by how you were raised, the grand daddy of all “pleasure-pain” social complexes is religion. In the vast majority of these social applications, promotions, and tribal endeavors, the division of people into an “us” and a “them” is an absolute necessity for them to successfully manipulate the masses of people. But at this point, I exercise a modicum of caution - not because of repercussions from being honest about religion, but because the nature of the ‘anti-freedom,’ ‘anti-questioning,’ orthodoxy is just so vast as to require much more room than a blog (I note that copious numbers of books are available on this subject alone). Our beliefs become the boundaries of our existence and religion wants these boundaries to be both restrictive and tightly controlled by their words and institutional presence and prerogatives.
The Stoics often talk about being aware of people and activities that “take our attention and time” from us with no real return on the investment. And so it is with too much of what the “reseaux sociaux” and all other forms of media and religion, because religions are just the version 1.0 of social media in a philosophical sense. For your own well being and protection of your sense of self and self-value, you have to establish the habit of asking, “What’s really in it for me?” and repeating of the phrase, “So what if everyone else is doing it? That doesn’t mean it is good or will benefit me!” And as long as you keep applying this test diligently, you will be able to at least partially immunize your mind from the effects of the mind numbing banality of “mauvais reseaux sociaux.” My prescription: Carve out a space where you eliminate all social and/or media influence, turn off the phone at night, put it in another room if needs be. Limit your time to, say, an hour (morning or night) and be regimented with yourself. When time’s up, put down the phone, get off the internet, no “if’s, and’s, or buts”… your personal sanity and spiritual well being trump everything else. If your friends really need you, make them write a letter (if they are distant) or come over to you, if the situation is truly urgent. Otherwise, get your face outta Facebook and stop Snapping. Peace.
“What? I should have plenty left, like 10,000 pts.!”
I didn’t.
They were at zero!
Either I’d done a terrible job of keeping track (which, in hindsight, may be the case) or I had been robbed by the app company! “Why you bastards!” I thought. But a timed portion of the lesson was running out in the app and I didn’t want to “drop down” in my ranking - so I paid a couple of bucks. I fumed…. grumble, grumble, rant, rant…. on further reflection and thought it made me examine my state of mind with a more skeptical and analytical eye. “What was I really doing? Remember what the ancients said…. Nosce te ipsum: ‘Know thy self.’ That’s what the Oracle at Delphi had written on it’s entrance.”
Now I’ve been trained in psychology and I had the presence of mind to ask, “Why am I feeling this way?” I’m a Stoic and disciplined self-reflection is a hallmark of that school of philosophy. I began to analyze… “Well, because you’ve just realized you’ve been played, like a cheap violin.” I sat back and began to realized I’d been manipulated by the app to “care” about this utterly unimportant competition with people on-line I had NO inkling or awareness of. Neurologically, the app had weaseled and manipulated its way into my dopamine/rewards center of my brain like a virus and hijacked the stimulus-rewards response… I’d been suckered. “Damn it.” Now I was really pissed… Stimulus-Reward. I should have seen it coming.
You may see this story as no big deal and in the grand scheme of things and you’d be right. But the insidious ease with which I was played peaked both my anger and my awareness. “How many ways are we all being played?” The key to the question is to look closely at all the ways we interact with things… not just tech, but all our worldly activities. Our interactions on-line, the way we get involved with our entertainment or news intake, how we make the choices of our food and even the socio-religio-political views are suspect and in need of a serious assessment. For instance, I really started with my language app because it offered good lessons in a way that we “naturally” learn languages and the local community college was not offering “in-person” instruction in French (it was the Pandemic at the time I started so that made sense back then). But, somewhere along the way, I got suckered into caring about competing with other learners - used as a motivational factor but also utterly ridiculous because that was not my original purpose in using the app. But competition and reward are a subtle demons and they possessed my thinking far too easily before I exorcised it from my studies. “What else should I be cautious and make a careful analysis of?”
Sports, religion, politics, “pop” culture are just a few of the subjects that immediately came to mind. But don’t think that’s all, you see, because the tech and advertising communities of companies are constantly on the hunt for ways to separate “you” from “your money.” Even if their efforts result in us having increased tribalism, isolation, false equivalencies, and pure ‘fadism’ they are like the shark constantly on the prowl for a quick meal (and they are not sullied or slowed by morals in the process). Now this is not a new message, not by a long shot. But the constant drone of the quick fix from tech, commercialist forces, and the sports industrial complex can be hard to keep at bay, much less under control. And depending on how you were prepared to see the world by how you were raised, the grand daddy of all “pleasure-pain” social complexes is religion. In the vast majority of these social applications, promotions, and tribal endeavors, the division of people into an “us” and a “them” is an absolute necessity for them to successfully manipulate the masses of people. But at this point, I exercise a modicum of caution - not because of repercussions from being honest about religion, but because the nature of the ‘anti-freedom,’ ‘anti-questioning,’ orthodoxy is just so vast as to require much more room than a blog (I note that copious numbers of books are available on this subject alone). Our beliefs become the boundaries of our existence and religion wants these boundaries to be both restrictive and tightly controlled by their words and institutional presence and prerogatives.
The Stoics often talk about being aware of people and activities that “take our attention and time” from us with no real return on the investment. And so it is with too much of what the “reseaux sociaux” and all other forms of media and religion, because religions are just the version 1.0 of social media in a philosophical sense. For your own well being and protection of your sense of self and self-value, you have to establish the habit of asking, “What’s really in it for me?” and repeating of the phrase, “So what if everyone else is doing it? That doesn’t mean it is good or will benefit me!” And as long as you keep applying this test diligently, you will be able to at least partially immunize your mind from the effects of the mind numbing banality of “mauvais reseaux sociaux.” My prescription: Carve out a space where you eliminate all social and/or media influence, turn off the phone at night, put it in another room if needs be. Limit your time to, say, an hour (morning or night) and be regimented with yourself. When time’s up, put down the phone, get off the internet, no “if’s, and’s, or buts”… your personal sanity and spiritual well being trump everything else. If your friends really need you, make them write a letter (if they are distant) or come over to you, if the situation is truly urgent. Otherwise, get your face outta Facebook and stop Snapping. Peace.
Comments
Post a Comment