I find it easy to find counter-examples to these anecdotes. There are a lot of people very aware of how rich other people are without it affecting them one bit.
I think it boils down to this: very rarely will you receive just plain vanilla information, if such a thing exists. Almost always the information will be wrapped in some kind of value system. As you absorb the information, you end up taking in the value system as well.
Let's use TV as an example. So yep, if you spend your time on one of those cable channels where you watch rich people all the time, pretty soon it's not that you'll understand how rich people live, it's that pretty soon you'll start believing that it is better to live like they do. Same goes for the other channels - military, cooking, whatever. These channels are purveyors of information, sure, but what they're really selling is indoctrination.
That's fine if you understand it. You should be able to compensate (without having fits about "the man" or "the system") After all, why would they spend time sharing information with you that they felt wasn't trendy and something you'd want to emulate? There might be a boring stuff nobody cares about channel, but I've never seen it.
Truly happy people can filter out the value system from the information. They can watch MSNBC, Fox, or CNN. They just compare sources and make their own value decisions.
It's like this guy got halfway to the actual state of things, then just gave up. Yes, if you have no information you have no external values being pimped out to you, but you also are missing a huge amount of learning about your fellow man and other ways of thinking about things. No information means no choices. You don't want that.
> Let's use TV as an example. So yep, if you spend your time on one of those cable channels where you watch rich people all the time, pretty soon it's not that you'll understand how rich people live, it's that pretty soon you'll start believing that it is better to live like they do.
I read some speculation that these declining birth rates with the availability of television was due to having a new alternatives to sex after the sun went down. Without TV and electricity (lighting for reading and other activities) there are not as many activities available to compete with baby-making.
I'm not sure what a truly happy person is, but research has shown "...that people who are very optimistic about the outcome of events tend to learn only from information that reinforces their rose-tinted view of the world. This is related to 'faulty' function of their frontal lobes."
I think it boils down to this: very rarely will you receive just plain vanilla information, if such a thing exists. Almost always the information will be wrapped in some kind of value system. As you absorb the information, you end up taking in the value system as well.
Let's use TV as an example. So yep, if you spend your time on one of those cable channels where you watch rich people all the time, pretty soon it's not that you'll understand how rich people live, it's that pretty soon you'll start believing that it is better to live like they do. Same goes for the other channels - military, cooking, whatever. These channels are purveyors of information, sure, but what they're really selling is indoctrination.
That's fine if you understand it. You should be able to compensate (without having fits about "the man" or "the system") After all, why would they spend time sharing information with you that they felt wasn't trendy and something you'd want to emulate? There might be a boring stuff nobody cares about channel, but I've never seen it.
Truly happy people can filter out the value system from the information. They can watch MSNBC, Fox, or CNN. They just compare sources and make their own value decisions.
It's like this guy got halfway to the actual state of things, then just gave up. Yes, if you have no information you have no external values being pimped out to you, but you also are missing a huge amount of learning about your fellow man and other ways of thinking about things. No information means no choices. You don't want that.