October 20, 2017

Why You Should Boycott Pop Culture

By wise sloth

Decades ago, psychologists working for advertising agencies and marketing departments of large corporations discovered two truths about the human mind:

1: Even though everyone has their own unique beliefs, we all have the same basic desires and psychological tendencies.

2: Since everyone has differing beliefs, anytime your product advocates any belief, it will disenfranchise a percentage of your audience. Therefore, the best way to avoid alienating your audience is to never advocate any beliefs other than the most basic, vague, non-offensive, non-committal ideas possible.

This means, the best product a media company can make, is one that appeals to our base desires and is void of any meaningful substance. The major media companies have been producing vapid content for the entire history of mass media. This means generations of Americans have been raised on brain candy time filler.

 

 

Americans defend their addiction to pop culture by arguing that it’s healthy to take a break from the serious struggles of life every once and a while. That’s true, but the average American spends as much time in front of the TV as they do at work, watching substance-less entertainment. Even if you don’t own a TV, you can’t get away from pop culture, because it’s mainstream culture, and it’s everywhere you look.

When the majority of the information you process day-in and day-out is white noise, you end up mentally deafened by the silence. Spend enough time in the silence, and you forget that life was ever, or could ever,  be any different. So you accept the silence as the norm, and when you’re faced with real, hard information, you’re likely to view it from your mentally weakened perspective, as cumbersome, tedious, pretentious and irrelevant.

Pop culture isn’t so evil it will turn you into a maniacal, baby-eating monster if you watch one primetime sitcom… but once you’ve felt the soft, warm, intoxicating, addicting embrace, you’ll want to go back to that place anytime life gets hard. The more time you spend in that honey trap, the less time you spend facing the real world.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. Mozart wasn’t born a genius. Talent is cumulative. Genius is cumulative. Sanity is cumulative. Becoming the person you’re capable of being, having the mind you’re capable of having, and building the world you’re capable of building takes decades of daily practice and refinement. When you spend 2-5 hours every night zoning out in front of the same clinically unintelligent stimulus, you irrevocably wipe away your potential, and by the time you reach old age, all you’ll be is exactly what you put your mind to: nothing.

To make matters worse, all those years you were lulled into that cozy dream state by the flashing lights in your living room and the pulsating music in your car, the real world problems that made you want to seek shelter in a movie theater, never went away. In fact, since the majority of the population has been ignoring those problems and pretending they’re Jedi Knights in space, those problems have only compounded. Look where’s it’s gotten society, on the verge of collapse.

If television and radio had been used to their full potential as educational tools ever since they were invented, and we had all devoted ourselves to improving our minds instead of glazing them over, we would literally be colonizing Mars right now. We certainly wouldn’t be worrying about the eco-system collapsing from the careless destruction wrought on it by mass consumerism.

Is there hope for the world? Well, what is the world? The world is society, and society is made up of individuals. If we’re to save the world, then every individual needs to stop numbing their minds with pop culture and dedicate themselves to using the majority of their free time to improving themselves.

You can’t make anyone else’s decisions for them. The world isn’t yours to change, but your fate is your responsibility. You have a choice. Boycott pop culture and actively improve your mind, and thus the world. Or continue enjoying pop culture and passively dumbing yourself down, and thus the world.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

General Pop Culture
Trending Topics
Movies, Music, and Television
Sports
Art
Fashion
Food and Drinks
Technology
Social Justice Warriors
Liberals and Conservatives
Baby Boomers and The Younger Generations
Racism and Xenophobia
Conspiracy Theories and Theorists
My Tweets About Pop Culture
This entry was posted on Friday, October 20th, 2017 at 6:37 pm and tagged with , , , , , , and posted in Movies and Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Feel free to leave a comment.