Thinking for Ourselves
Technology has changed the way we think, but we can still protect our ability to think for ourselves.
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Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
Frank Herbert
We’ve been surrendering our ability to think for ourselves for hundreds if not thousands of years.
Every new technology that comes along makes something that was once difficult, annoying, or time-consuming easier or faster.
We no longer think about things deeply or try to solve our own problems, we just look them up.
Instead of creating our philosophy on life based on our experiences, we adopt someone else's.
Instead of going to the store and trying something ourselves, we read reviews, watch YouTube videos, and use the feedback of others to make our decisions.
Most of what we are exposed to today is filtered to us based only on volume. Whatever gets the most eyeballs is what proliferates.
Authors are given book deals on the size of their following, not the quality of their ideas.
Bloggers write posts about whatever gets the most likes on Twitter, not what they believe in or have researched the most.
In almost every aspect of our lives, we outsource our thinking.
More and more we’re searching for answers externally instead of internally.
The danger of outsourced opinions
Turning our thinking over to external sources is particularly insidious today for two reasons: all information has an agenda and for every truth, there is a conveniently omitted counter-truth.
Almost all of the content on the internet exists for one reason, to generate a profit.
If we choose to blindly trust everything we come across online, we are not serving our own interests, we are adding to someone else's bottom line.
There’s nothing wrong with making money online, but the more we trust outsourced opinions the more likely it is that we will be paying for it whether we realize it or not.
Outsourced opinions are also dangerous because, for every truth we encounter online, there is at least one (if not many) conveniently omitted counter-truths.
Take diet and exercise advice for example. There are pundits and legitimate clinical research to support many different approaches, but you will never hear die-hard vegetarians tip their cap to the keto folks.
If we want to hold well-informed and agenda-free opinions we have to do the work ourselves.
The antidote to men with machines
When we’re perpetually online and bouncing from one thing to the next we’re prone to absorbing everything we see without a second thought.
Fighting against the traps of outsourced opinions and external influence requires a wide array of inputs and a genuine effort to understand and clarify them on our own.
Reading widely and exposing ourselves to lots of different opinions from lots of different sources will provide a holistic view of the important things in our lives.
But reading alone isn’t enough. The best way to form our own opinions is to put pen to paper and organize our thoughts with some form of writing or journaling.
Writing our thoughts down forces us to clarify them.
When we’re asked why we believe something or why we made a certain decision we can answer intelligently and explain our thinking.
In a world increasingly dominated by outsourced thinking and consensus opinions, it’s becoming more valuable to think for ourselves every day. And the best way to do this is the old-fashioned way.
Pen to paper. Ideas to insights.
Prompts
Where are you most susceptible to accepting external opinions?
Which areas of your life are worth the extra work of forming your own opinion?
Do you think we’ve gone too far handing over our thinking to men with machines?
Deep Dive
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains - Nicholas Carr
Carr digs into the question, “is Google making us stupid?” and details how the internet has changed the way we think.
Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.
Kevin