Mental Masturbation and why most content you consume is useless
I’ll keep this short.
You might have heard about mental masturbation. It’s when you consume content (or talk about it with someone) that seems very intellectually stimulating but really actually isn’t. You use such content to run away from harder things, from truths that are more painful to accept.
It’s just like sexual masturbation. You replace sex with something which is easier and yet gives a very similar experience to sex.
And hence, most of the content you and I are going to consume in life is going to be of this kind. The goal is to keep away from such content and to get closer to the more fundamental truths of the world.
Truths are simple, reliable and proven facts that add to the real knowledge of your brain. You can use these principles to better your understanding of the world, improve your life, understand other human beings, etc. Real knowledge and truth beget real-world change.
And every now and then you’ll hear gurus, bloggers, filmmakers, artists, writers, etc who tell you about the complexity of the world and how it takes a long time to get to the facts of the matter. But that isn’t the case because the truth isn’t larger than life, full of complexity and a thing that takes years of rituals to discover. Truth is the more fundamental, simple and benign object that is smaller than the large complexities people often talk about.
Truth does not need explanations. Truth is always simple enough to understand on its own. And if it’s even a little more complex than that, then it isn’t the truth. It’s the interpretation of the truth. And that interpretation adds to the complexity.
If the truth wasn’t ridiculously simple enough, it would have been impossible to discover by animals like us.
So the next time you go out in the world and consume content in various different ways, beware of such complex things, beware when people say truth is hard to find and avoid things that feel good but never lead to real-world change. Most often you’ll actually miss the truths in life since you are searching for some more complex explanation that doesn’t exist.
Because even though truth seems too obvious and unimportant at the moment, in hindsight you’ll realize that this is how you identify truth in the first place. Obvious & unimportant- something you’ll usually miss seeing but something that is bound to influence significantly your mind, life and this universe.
