“The people will not revolt. They will not look up from their screens long enough to notice what’s happening.” – George Orwell
As Connie flipped on the nightly news, she was reminded of what a scary world it is. Homicides in her city were up. Rape was more common than ever. She was sure she’d heard of at least three different girlfriends talking about being sexually harassed at a local bar. She thought to herself, “I should start carrying mace.” She flipped to another channel, and the news was similar. The CDC was featured in a story, telling people they should be very afraid of the next pandemic. In fact, millions of chickens were infected with a deadly virus. Pigs might be next, then bats, monkeys, and yes, even humans. Connie reached for a book, one her sister had recommended she read about time management, but she couldn’t seem to turn herself away from the pictures glowing on her screen, and soon, her favorite sitcom was coming on.
If you’re anything like Connie, television and cable TV have been a large part of your life. According to Statista, people 15 and older spent at least three hours a day watching television in 2023, and while there’s a growing decline in audience for mainstream media, many people still rely on it for a source of entertainment and information.
We live in times of a highly defined narrative. It is promulgated by just a handful of media companies that control the airwaves, the same way they used to control the newspapers before they became obsolete. In the 1950s, we had a little more variety. 50 companies owned 90% of all media. Now, only 6 companies: Disney, Time Warner, National Amusements, Comcast, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., and Sony determine what you’ll watch every night. This includes the so-called news, all entertainment, and even what is available to watch or read on the internet. Dozens of news networks, for example, share the exact same message across multiple platforms. It’s a relentless programming of your mind and mood.
During Obama’s presidency, the US also repealed a long-standing ban on propaganda, making it completely legal for the government to lie to people through their television sets or the internet. Scripted and orchestrated propaganda is now vomited out to you due to the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act. There’s more than $500 billion invested in a narrative that might not be so good for your mental health, but the antidote could be achingly simple.
Altered Brain Structures, Cognitive Decline, Increased Depression, and Mean World Syndrome
Watching television consistently has been linked to cognitive decline, memory failure, reduced amounts of gray matter, an increased risk of depression and anxiety, and the development of “mean world syndrome.”
Scientific Reports published a study in Nature showing that the more television you watch, the more cognitive decline tends to occur. Verbal fluency and memory in particular were impacted.
If that’s not enough to convince you to maybe take a walk in nature, spend time face-to-face with friends, or read a good book, perhaps this will convince you. A John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health study found that watching TV too much causes a reduction in the cranial gray matter of your brain. Grey matter.
Additional research shows that watching television for more than five hours daily can cause an increase in dementia, and mentally passive activities like TV watching can also cause a whopping 43% increase in depressive symptoms.
The solution could be simple, though. Just turn it off.
With binge-watching causing an increase in anxiety as you’re constantly berated with bad news, as well as depression in teens, it can also cause “Mean World Syndrome,” a mental health condition where you see the world as an aggressive place with increased feelings of fear, anxiety, and pessimism. Is it any wonder though considering what is normally reported on most major news networks?
Good News Bad News
Research indicates that major news networks tend to report more on negative events compared to positive ones. For instance, a study that looked at approximately 141,000 English-language news headlines related to COVID-19 from January to June 2020 found that 52% evoked negative sentiments, while only 30% were positive. The entire Covid vaccine campaign was meant to instill fear into you so that you would comply with vaccine mandates, unnecessary quarantines, go along with your business being shut down, and masking-up when there was no proof that it “stopped the spread.”
What’s more, this constant propagandizing was harmful to your mental health. A 2020 study published in Nature Human Behaviour revealed that negative words in news headlines increased consumption rates, with each additional negative word increasing the click-through rate by 2.3%. Why? The tendency to report negative information is blamed on a "negativity bias," a psychological phenomenon where individuals pay more attention to negative information. The media emphasizes negative stories to attract and keep your attention and get higher ratings. We’re programmed to scan our environment for potential danger as a life-saving dictate by our nervous system. When we’re constantly bombarded with war, fire, famine, rape, vaccine mandates, and more, our cortisol levels spike, and we can’t exist in a state of peace and calm.
Television isn’t a One-Way Viewing Device
Yet another reason to unplug from the tube is that Smart televisions are built with methods to monitor your behavior, including voice commands and viewing habits. Your privacy is invaded as they collect your data and farm it out to other big companies and the government.
Voice Recognition and Data Collection
TVs have built-in microphones that listen for activation phrases, but they can also capture entire conversations you have with people in the comfort of your own home or office. A 2022 article noted that voice activation features can gather large amounts of data, and these recordings are indeed sent to third parties for analysis.
Automatic Content Recognition (ACR)
Smart TVs also use Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology to identify and track what you are viewing. This data provides “personalized recommendations” and tells advertisers what to try to sell you. It also starts to create tunnel vision as you’re fed programs that are similar, rather than exposing you to a variety of human experience and information as you might learn from reading books, and interacting with friends, business associates, or family in the real world. Your user habits are also shared with third parties, often without your consent, or it's in fine print so you never realize you can opt out. This also explains why so many people have become close minded as they’re fed a Deep State rhetoric that has them believing lies and losing touch with their own humanity.
Again, the solution could be simple. Just unplug. As George Orwell warned in 1984, the television is a surveillance device.
“The telescreen [television] received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.” – George Orwell, 1984
What can you do instead of watching the tube? Try walking in nature, getting some exercise, learning a new language, painting, singing, writing, dancing, woodworking, or spending time with friends. All of these activities are proven to improve your mental state and combat depression and anxiety.
I cut the cable when my children were 10, 12 and 14. It moved their IQ up 20 points.
Their surveillance will show we are super boring people.