Several generations ago, your great grandparents likely worked on a farm or in a dimly-lit urban factory after dropping out of school. They toiled doing menial labor for hours on end, kept a home together, and sometimes learned to read if they were particularly lucky. At or before age 18, they married the child of a close family friend, or perhaps even a cousin. They had kids immediately and continued working until they died in their sleep, never having left their home town.
Two generations ago, people began to go to college en masse. They read a few classic books and got a nice degree that ensured them a middle-class job. They would marry someone they met at their job, go on a few nice vacations, and have unremarkable kids. They would live modestly off their pensions until dying of a heart attack at age 68.
More recently, “Generation X”ers were pushed into taking on debt to pay for increasingly worthless college degrees. They could tell that something seemed vaguely wrong with Reagan-era consumerism, but were poorly equipped to deal with the changing economic, global, and social climate.
This generation lives in an age where information travels exponentially faster than any other period in human history. With a few keystrokes, you can call up exhaustive information on any subject and, if you know where to look, best practices for a fulfilling and healthy life. I fear that many within and outside of the manosphere overlook this monumental gift of our time. Without this knowledge-transfer, I would have never known things such as:
- That All Girls LIke Rough Sex
- Not to worry about monogamy
- Not to make waves at work
- How to spot a false rape accusation
My colleague Western Cancer recently posted on the paralysis by analysis that comes with technology’s increasing prevalence in our lives. Perhaps he is right to an extent — too much of a good thing can arrest progress and may fail to make us happier on a day to day basis, as he laid out. But I contend that when managed properly, it allows us to make better decisions that can lead to long-term well-being.
Any question that you can imagine about game, lifestyle, fitness, nutrition, money, entrepreneurship, or wisdom has been asked and answered scores of times by men like you, many of whom have made mistakes that you can learn from. The collected wisdom of millions is available to you if you know where to look.
Despite the increasing prevalence of keyboard jockeys, the signal to noise ratio is still high enough in this corner of the internet for you to learn by asking the right questions. No one in the history of humanity has had these opportunities on a daily basis. Simply by being alive in this generation, you’ve been given a tremendous gift of information and, if you learn how to synthesize it, knowledge. How will you use it to improve your life?
Read More: Everything Is Amazing Right Now And Nobody’s Happy
Despite all the social media hate, I’ve learned some good things off the internet. Things like game, weight lifting, and how to make money. I use facebook to network and make more money and meet more people.
Internet is ultimately an amazing tool.
Ironic that a post titled the Gift of Information should be so information-free itself. Did we just get trolled?
It’s an analysis, not a guide.
Information is only good in how one uses it. With the dearth of information available on the internet, using what helps to get us to become better individuals is essential. Otherwise, you’ll know a lot about nothing and not enough about what is truly important.
True, and it goes to show how important critical thinking skills are in sifting through, analyzing, and synthesizing the available information.
“This generation lives . . .”
Although news of my birth did not travel to anyone by means of satellite communications, because, ya know, there weren’t any frickin’ satellites, so do I. For that matter, so does my Linux running mother. My Aunt, born more than a century ago, uses a Mac, so we’ll just agree to try to ignore her as one of those damn hipster kids.
I believe part of what is great about the internet, is not simply the increase in total amount of information that can be communicated; but just as much the underlying protocols’ resistance to centralized control. Which in many ways helps revert us back to an earlier era, before mass communications.
In bygone times, information only traveled by word of mouth, or handwritten letters by courier. In such a world, controlling people by controlling the communication received, was difficult to impossible. With the advent of first newspapers and movie reels, then radio and TV, it became possible for those in charge to supplant all the small, independent information sources people relied on, with a few easily controlled centralized ones. Which served well for “uniting” large numbers of sheeple into “nation states”, “genders” and the other artificial aggregations of the past century and a half’s totalitarian communistic, progressive or fascistic dystopias.
The internet does provide an information sharing protocol that is even more convenient than those of the centralized providers, while simultaneously being almost as resistant to control as time honored word of mouth transmission. Which will, at least one can hope, start reversing the horrors that was inflicted upon humanity in the mass communication era.
“In bygone times, information only traveled by word of mouth, or handwritten letters by courier.”
One if by land, two if by sea.
“With the advent of first newspapers and movie reels, then radio and TV,
it became possible for those in charge to supplant all the small,
independent information sources people relied on, with a few easily
controlled centralized ones”
How?
The nationalized BBC, and heavily regulated ABC etc., are easy to regulate, as there is so few of them. Just look at how important it is to those committing a coup d’etats, to take over the centralized media outfits. From there, they can control people’s perception of reality.
Before mass communication, this was not really possible. And with the advent of a more decentralized internet, it is becoming more difficult again.
For humans capable of self-restraint, the internet is the greatest of tools.
For the other 95% of humanity, it a time-sink which prevents them from escaping their herd.
Speaking of information, I’ve noticed something about the kinds of people who go online to read up on brain fitness, brain training, diets for optimal cognitive performance and so forth.
They already seem to fall on the right side of the IQ bell curve. They’ve seen the advantages of intelligence in human life, and they want to preserve what they already have, at least, even if they can’t find the right hacks to improve upon it.
By contrast, the people on the left side of the bell curve, who would really, really benefit from becoming smarter, just don’t seem to care about enhancing brain performance at all.
“The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
they say it takes more effort to remain ignorant than to learn something….
there is definitely a danger sitting in front of a computer screen….. that makes you become very passive…..
watching too much TV also makes you passive, however that is obvious….
whereas on a PC you feel active, involved and like you are doing something…. but really you are just a book worm in the worlds largest library… and like any “lie-bury”…a lot of what you read is crap and what is useful is only useful if you put it to work and make it real……
I recall the days when the yellow pages and the landline phone was as good as it got….. but honestly if you wanted to go after something the information was pure, you were active rather than passive, and your life became real, rather than virtual…..
and can someone please explain to me…. why the fuck everyone has moved onto 3 inch screens and thumb typing in their phone when we used to have damn great laptops……with serious screen real estate and a real keyboard….
most of the economic down turn can be assigned to the loss of productivity trying to type and browse in a smart phone…. hahahhaaha
All true. Sitting in front of a screen all day will make you passive unless you get out and do something the with the information that you’ve gotten.
On the other hand, the Net makes available information at a speed that exponentially shortens the learning curve, and better puts you in touch with people who are dynamic and on the path that you want to follow.
In the “old days,” yes, we had to get out there and interact to find the information. But, the time and effort it took, as well as the exasperation with schlubs who either wouldn’t give us the info or who were stuck in an old and decrepit mindset, wasn’t worth it in the end. What we can get in ten seconds from the Net might have taken us a day when the Net didn’t exist.
Just something to keep in mind.
I just saw this picture and wanted to share it with you all.
Let’s all live by this.
Cheers
If only women where the same. IT seems they have a sign on their chest saying “Today I will be an even bitchier skank”
Information cant help at all. If it could, 99% of all western men still wouldnt be white knight blue pillers.
The one who SEEKS information will get it no matter how hard it is to optain. The ones who dont WANT INFORMATION will never get it, not matter how much you bormbard them.
i.e seek, and ye shall find?
While there is so much information on any topic you care to imagine available to us the situations of ‘information overload’ or ‘analysis paralysis’ are very real.
My time in the military brought this to the fore as commanders at levels previously insulated from the fine details at the battlefront began to lose focus on the bigger picture and get ‘down in the weeds’. As soon as this begins, they forget their job and micro-manage.
Effective filters need to be applied. Trust people to come to conclusions that you can accept without having to do all the ground work yourself. This will free you to take advantage of the information out there as well as the analysis of others. By doing so you can concentrate on furthering yourself using the information as a tool, rather than making your own out of lumps of steel and timber.