It has been 5 days since I got back on social media and I can already see that I was better off when I had them uninstalled and blocked.
Catching up on current affairs and seeing all the horrible developments in the world got me emotionally invested, and I was starting to engage in public discussion of these issues once again. I was writing a rant on Instagram until I started questioning why I was even doing this. Life went on as usual when I had no knowledge of any of these developments and just focused on work and the people around me.
Throughout my schooling years, I was encouraged to read up on global affairs as much as possible. The idea of being a global citizen, informed and engaged in the affairs of the wider world was drilled in me by the Singaporean education system. But is the human brain designed to consume this much information and commit to matters of such a wide scale on a daily basis? For most of history, the average person only had to think about his family and his immediate community. But now we are expected to invest our commitments to abstract causes in relations matters happening far away, with new information constantly being fed to us at such a rapid pace.
Maybe the world has gone insane because all this rapid access to information and artificial online communities are driving us all mad.
Is it a good thing for me to be informed of these things? On one hand, it is not good to bury one’s head in the sand, retreating to a delusional cope like the trads who idolise the medieval peasant oblivious to the daily scandals of the papacy in his day. If every decent person refused to concern themselves with wider affairs and not involve themselves in public discourse of any kind, obviously you will see that the malicious ones will take power, like we see the woke having seized control of key institutions like academia because the right spurned and retreated from them. On the other, one can be so consumed by them that they end up like the schizo orthobro on twitter prattling about how the Filioque is the root cause of the debauchery of the West.
I think, once again, the doctrine of vocation has a lot to do with the answer to this question.
