Ask HN: What is top of your mind?

Hoping to build a lap pool here in the future for my health (daily exercise). This land also contains the waterpit we already use, so should give us some security wrt clean drinking water in future. We’ll make a nice garden for relax. And I’ll try some aquaponics as well. Might be useful to be able to grow your own food in the near future.

Useless information occupies every open space inside your skull

You know whats going on every day every night

Everywhere swear you're so international

...

Whatchya gonna be when you're grown young blood?

Gonna be a helpless drone

Won't ever have to think

No your head'll be linked directly to your cell phone

The virus is alive, I can see it in your eyes

The infection is full blown

...

Shiva slashin through your flat screen

Is nowhere for you to hide

Strangled by anaconda thumbs to the soundtrack of world genocide

why am I thinking about this? your life is the sum of the things you spent attention on. because there are serious detriments to the mind in not being able to regulate the inlet of information.

infinite scroll news feeds that lead us to internalize every trauma on earth via constant exposure leads to a mental firewalling, leads to defamiliarization and derealization of one's own neighborhood or even internal struggles. to build a map of the world, it needs to be world-sized, and my friend, our brains are not. so we compress the world to simple pictures and stories. but we don't play a role in them.

compression leads to division - you are confident that your source of information of preference surely is giving you a balanced picture of every side of a story. furthermore you are so confident about this, you feel as though you can predict accurately what your perceived opposites pay attention to. so why bother wasting precious mental resources on establishing connections to them also, when you feel as though you're already getting that for free.

after which you then become suspicious of anyone who acts as a bridge, surely they are just a rogue saboteur from the other side, since your own picture is clear enough to tell you the real truth.

soon you have a broad enough big picture understanding of the topic that you can derive ultimate conclusions of the logical consequences of any concern. but you find that they all lead, at their terminus, to another story, but always a story of either great suffering or triumph. thereby validating your trenchant persistence to save the world.

so furthermore, every enframing that began with simple factual statements, is a road whose destination is a really emotional call to action. it all becomes instinct, every conviction becoming something you feel hot in your bones.

because you have no real effect on the stories you live through, you live through picking which stories you attend to. you become virtual. all the while, you never learn the names of your neighbors in the apartments next door, you never have conversations with the grocer, you use your gym time to catch up on podcasts, you take selfies at marches, you don't hand the beggar a 20 and you don't make eye contact with them, you don't leave your phone at home when you go for a walk in nature, you don't go anywhere without your airpods, etc..

and i say that all really feeling terrible about what is going on in ukraine, just in case you were looking to read this in a way such that you thought i was minimizing that